Whipped Cream Difficulties

Science Sunday!

The SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory has a YouTube channel. (The SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory was formerly known as the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, so I guess this is now the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center National Accelerator Laboratory, unless SLAC is now one of those acryonyms that doesn’t stand for anything.)

“Here Be Monsters: Tales of the Hot Universe”.

In this talk, we embark on a remarkable adventure that explores the hottest and most powerful objects in the universe. Our travels take us from the millions of tiny black holes that live in our own galaxy, the Milky Way, to the huge ones lurking at the centers of all massive galaxies. We then explore the gigantic cosmic structures that are clusters of galaxies. These structures contain hundreds to thousands of galaxies, but more importantly a prodigious amount of hot gas heated to a million degrees. We will discuss how the interaction of the gas, the galaxies, and monstrous black holes make these clusters some the most powerful beacons of X-ray light in the cosmos.

Bonus: Here’s a lost art: “The Slide Rule (The “C” and “D” Scales)”.