Since I’ve been very busy lately my good friend Michael Schmidt agreed to do another guest post! Mike has a masters degree in physics from the University of Colorado at Boulder. You can check out Mike’s own blog at duality.io or his personal website Mike’s Personal Website. Without further ado, here’s Mike: Lightning Detection Currently, in the mid-west of the United States the first thunderstorms of the year have begun. Because I am a giant geek, I love lightning and I think tracking lightning is quite interesting. My personal favorite site is LightningMaps. On LightningMaps website you’ll see
April 2015
Astrophysics / Physics / Science And Math
The Long Arms of the Black Hole
Black holes are incredibly messy eaters. As matter falls into a spinning black hole, that matter can be accelerated to incredible velocities and launched out the poles. In the case of the supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies, these are the most energetic events in the universe since the Big Bang. The exact mechanism for the creation of these jets is unknown. There are two competing theories, one called the Blandford-Payne mechanism, and one called the Blandford-Znajek mechanism. The details are too fiddly to get into here, but the former has more to do with the in-falling