Seeing comments on the forum used to advertise the "400 million #twitter users' data breach for sale" expressing increasing skepticism that it's legit.

#CosoInfosec #Infosec

@aravosis aaand welcome fo Counter.Social, too :)

This seems bad.

@jacquieb what counts as an old timer? I joined a couple of months after launch...

@artemis of course, our observing time for black holes is a pretty short period of time, so it's entirely possible that there is other unexpected phenomena that impacts them.

@artemis the most current thinking (for which Hawking is known) is that black holes themselves are pretty much indestructible, BUT they do "evaporate" through radiation due to pairs of quantum particles that randomly pop into existence at the event horizon. These particles normally do that everywhere. But at the event horizon, one particle of the pair may be sucked into the black hole while the other radiates away, taking energy with it. After trillions of years, the black hole disappears.

@artemis there have been proposals! I think Roger Penrose worked on one idea.

@artemis it's all conserved, yes. It gets kind of funky because the energies are so extreme that relativistic effects come into play. But the energy gained due to the change in potential as material falls into a black hole has to go somewhere -- in this case, it's being converted to heat (and radiated away), or neutrinos through other high energy processes.

@artemis yes. And the tremendous gravity well results in material which is falling in (being accreted) radiating away up to ~42% of the material's rest mass.

By contrast, nuclear fusion converts about 1/2% of rest mass into energy.

Accretion is the most efficient means known (aside from matter-antimatter annihilation) to convert matter to energy, and the regions near supermassive black holes are the most powerful long-term sources of energy in the known universe.

@artemis Nothing escapes black holes themselves. But the regions near black holes are where some really high energy things take place, including electron corona, accretion disks that release monstrous amounts of energy, and jets of material. It is these regions that produce emissions such as the neutrinos detected here.

For the first time, IceCube found evidence of high-energy neutrino emission from NGC 1068, an active galaxy in the constellation Cetus and one of the most familiar and well-studied galaxies.

Funded by the National Science Foundation

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abg3395

#CoSoScience
#Science

@JasminJade welcome!

@DEShapiro I was trying to view 48-hour stats, but running into difficulties (using the Android app). Could be user error :)

@VeganCaliGirl welcome!