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Power Femme
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Cinnamon spiced, caramel colored, power-femme
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She
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Married to a wonderful horse girl
Join Date: Oct 2009
Location: Lat: 45.60 Lon: -122.60
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Supermassive black holes spin faster than expected
http://idealab.talkingpointsmemo.com....php?ref=fpblg
What I find so fascinating about this is that a consequence of E=mc^2* is as any object with mass approaches the speed of light it becomes more massive requiring every more energy to push it even closer to C**. A black hole is, by necessity, several solar masses (the mass of Sol multiplied by some number N). Supermassive black holes are in the realm of millions to billions of solar masses! So if a tiny sub-atomic particle with mass requires a fantastic amount of energy to get it moving at an appreciable fraction of the speed of light, imagine the kind of energy it takes to get something billions of times more massive than our local star moving at close to the speed of light! That's an unimaginable amount of energy!
* E=mc^2 is energy equals mass times the speed of light squared.
** C is the common shorthand notation for the speed of light.
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Proud member of the reality-based community.
"People on the side of The People always ended up disappointed, in any case. They found that The People tended not to be grateful or appreciative or forward-thinking or obedient. The People tended to be small-minded and conservative and not very clever and were even distrustful of cleverness. And so, the children of the revolution were faced with the age-old problem: it wasn’t that you had the wrong kind of government, which was obvious, but that you had the wrong kind of people. As soon as you saw people as things to be measured, they didn’t measure up." (Terry Pratchett)
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