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Readers! A November fund-raising drive!

 

It is unfortunately time for another November fund-raising campaign to support my work here at Behind the Black. I really dislike doing these, but 2025 is so far turning out to be a very poor year for donations and subscriptions, the worst since 2020. I very much need your support for this webpage to survive.

 

And I think I provide real value. Fifteen years ago I said SLS was garbage and should be cancelled. Almost a decade ago I said Orion was a lie and a bad idea. As early as 1998, long before almost anyone else, I predicted in my first book, Genesis: The Story of Apollo 8, that private enterprise and freedom would conquer the solar system, not government. Very early in the COVID panic and continuing throughout I noted that every policy put forth by the government (masks, social distancing, lockdowns, jab mandates) was wrong, misguided, and did more harm than good. In planetary science, while everyone else in the media still thinks Mars has no water, I have been reporting the real results from the orbiters now for more than five years, that Mars is in fact a planet largely covered with ice.

 

I could continue with numerous other examples. If you want to know what others will discover a decade hence, read what I write here at Behind the Black. And if you read my most recent book, Conscious Choice, you will find out what is going to happen in space in the next century.

 

 

This last claim might sound like hubris on my part, but I base it on my overall track record.

 

So please consider donating or subscribing to Behind the Black, either by giving a one-time contribution or a regular subscription. I could really use the support at this time. There are five ways of doing so:

 

1. Zelle: This is the only internet method that charges no fees. All you have to do is use the Zelle link at your internet bank and give my name and email address (zimmerman at nasw dot org). What you donate is what I get.

 

2. Patreon: Go to my website there and pick one of five monthly subscription amounts, or by making a one-time donation. Takes about a 10% cut.
 

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Behind The Black
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You can also support me by buying one of my books, as noted in the boxes interspersed throughout the webpage or shown in the menu above.


Combined Earth-Space radio array discovers superhot quasar interior

The uncertainty of science: Data obtained by combining four ground-based radio telescopes with the Russian orbiting RadioAstron 10-meter radio telescope have detected temperatures of 10 trillion degrees in the quasar 3C 273, a hundred times hotter than predicted possible by theory.

Supermassive black holes, containing millions to billions times the mass of our Sun, reside at the centers of all massive galaxies. These black holes can drive powerful jets that emit prodigiously, often outshining all the stars in their host galaxies. But there is a limit to how bright these jets can be – when electrons get hotter than about 100 billion degrees, they interact with their own emission to produce X-rays and Gamma-rays and quickly cool down.

Astronomers have just reported a startling violation of this long-standing theoretical limit in the quasar 3C 273. “We measure the effective temperature of the quasar core to be hotter than 10 trillion degrees!” comments Yuri Kovalev (Astro Space Center, Lebedev Physical Institute, Moscow, Russia), the RadioAstron project scientist. “This result is very challenging to explain with our current understanding of how relativistic jets of quasars radiate.”

In addition, the higher resolution of the radio images produced by this space/ground-based array was good enough to see the effect produced by the structure of the interstellar material between here and the quasar.

Genesis cover

On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.

 

The print edition can be purchased at Amazon or from any other book seller. If you want an autographed copy the price is $60 for the hardback and $45 for the paperback, plus $8 shipping for each. Go here for purchasing details. The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.


The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
 

"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News

3 comments

  • wodun

    OT: A guy rammed his car into the National Radio Astronomy Observatory on Mauna Kea. The articles says no link to the TMT protesters, but that seems unlikely.

    http://bigstory.ap.org/article/e353bcc4f07841dc84646590ad7ffcb5/man-arrested-mauna-kea-telescope-facility-rammed-vehicle

  • Tom Billings

    One of the things I’d like to see the space science community doing more with is space-based interferometry, all through the spectrum. If this result holds up, its push to the theory side of physics could be tremendous. Among other things, this could be showing what happens when the Dark Matter/Dark Energy supposedly dominating the mass of the universe interacts with these galactic black holes.

    The combination of resolution and sensitivity shown possible here should make this a new standard for space-based astronomy. True, the computational and metrical requirements become extreme as you go to shorter wavelengths, but the ability to peer into other planetary and galactic systems is what will push theory hardest.

  • Garry

    A hundred times hotter would seem to make a huge, huge difference.

    For example, given that the model for heat radiation states that energy radiated is proportional to (absolute temperature) to the fourth power, cranking up temperature by a factor 100 would increase radiant energy by a factor of 100 million!

    Either the model is inaccurate, or there is a lot more radiant energy out there than we thought, which has to have some dramatic effects.

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