The budding scientist in me had been tracking that storm. It encouraged me to keep paying attention to science and especially the sky. That included both astronomy and meteorology. Never mind that I discovered I loved computer science even more. I still enjoy the other two.

Storm Pulse has current as well as archive information on hurricanes.

The people on the Texas (and Louisiana) coast are in my prayers.

I just discovered your Astronomy Cast and this website. Well done! I have a paper accepted on astro-ph about young, dust reddened quasars in which we find a very large fraction of LoBALs (low ionization broad absorption line) quasars. These BALs have very strong high velocity winds, which can be believed to be AGN (quasar) feedback in action. My objects are very luminous (otherwise we wouldn’t have found them), so they don’t really compare that well to the paper you posted. Anyway, if you are interested… http://arxiv.org/abs/0808.3668

Also, good job on the podcast! Well researched and well done! Immediate addition to my iTunes. Keep up the good work.

Cheers

Tanya

If I understand this correctly, a 10B solar mass AGN can eat up to 100 solar masses worth of gas and dust per year- or does the paper say the rate is actually higher than that?

If I can stretch and tie this in to the Large Hadron Collider being turned on this week, a friend (@jamesrosberg) and I had a silly conversation on Twitter about how quickly any micro-black holes created by the LHC could eat the Earth.

My answer was a long time, but it’s a trick question because perception of time varies depending whether you are in the black hole or standing outside pretending you could actually see what is happening inside.

It sounds like this paper has more to do with AGNs disrupting star formation than their feeding rate per se, but if it is possible to answer our hypothetical by analogy, we’d be grateful for your thoughts on this question:

If we pretend that any micro black holes created by the LHC are permanent, dangerous and inclined to eat the Earth, what would their mass be and how long would it take to consume the mass of the Earth?

Many thanks!

Sounds like a great paper! I always knew that AGN ruled the universe.