Universe Teeming With Black Holes

Porfiry writes "For the first time, astronomers believe they have proof black holes of all sizes once ruled the universe. NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory provided the deepest X-ray images ever recorded (a million-second exposure), and those pictures deliver a novel look at the past 12 billion years of black holes. Combining infrared and X-ray observations, the Penn State team found veils of dust and gas are common around young black holes. 'The discovery of this object, some 12 billion light years away, is key to understanding how dense clouds of gas form galaxies, with massive black holes at their centers,' said Colin Norman of Johns Hopkins University."

Comments

Re:where do black holes go?

[Niggle]

Black holes "evaporate" via a process known a Hawking radiation. Basically, it works as follows:
1) A particle/anti-particle pair forms just above the event horizon.
2) One of the particle gets sucked in, the other escapes.
The energy to form the particle pair comes from the black hole itself, so that escaping particle carries off some energy. And E=mc^2 so it's exactly the same as if it had carried off some mass from the black hole.

Dark matter: how'd they think of that?

[paranormalized]

Probably not. Isn't Dark Matter supposed to account for something along 90+% of the 'missing' mass of the universe?

Although, how did they get that figure (or whatever the real figure is) at all? It's not like we can point to a spot in the sky and say the universe ends there. So how do they (they being the astronomers and astrophysicists) know how much mass is missing? (Sounds like I really need to pick up that book by Hawking...)

Two words: gravitational lensing...

Ok, imagine for a second that you're looking at a distant galaxy. Since matter bends light, you get an image of it from one angle. Now, suppose you look for galaxies at an angle just slightly different from the first angle. You see a galaxy. Upon inspection, it looks eerily like the first galaxy... in fact, neighboring galaxies seem to have 'clones' like the first galaxy too! What is going on?!?

What's happening is you're experiencing a 'lensing' effect by some matter that you can't see, allowing you to see one galaxy from many different angles. You plug the numbers into your computer model of the universe, try to figure out how much matter would produce said effect, (by laws of general relativity), and lo and behold, you get this figure for large amounts of invisible matter!

Now, what I'm interested in is how many galaxies have 'eaten' all their surrounding dust. If there was any dust, the black hole would compress it to unimaginable degrees as it drew said dust in, producing x-rays of incredible magnitude... some of the brightest/most energy-producing objects in the universe are thought to be such super-holes. So, either those billions of black holes have mostly 'evaporated', (see another poster's explanation of the process), or they have sucked up all nearby gasses/dust... this discovery is going to produce some interesting fodder for the cosmologists. (and no, a cosmologist doesn't worry about makeup, guys, and the modeling careers of universes. Well, maybe some of them do, but that's not their job ;)

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IANASRP- I am not a self-referential phrase
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Chandra is far from perfect.

[Caid Raspa]

This is a little bit technical, but you asked for it.

Chandra has two instruments, ACIS (Advanced Camera for Imaging and Spectroscopy) and HRC (High Resolution Camera). Almost all results going to the general public are made with ACIS. ACIS allows simultanoeus imaging AND spectroscopy. HRC was intended for really high resolution spectroscopy OR imaging.

ACIS is working nominally, and the Chandra team deserves all the credit for this. However, you do not hear that much about HRC. Why is that?

This is well documented: Have a look at the Chandra User Manual . See section 7.8.2.

Quote: The anti-coincidence shield of the HRC-S is not working because of a timing error in the electronics. The error is not correctable. As a result the event rate is very high and exceeds the total telemetry rate limit. So, they can not tell particles from X-rays.

The same in plain english: We are detecting more background than our data transfer can handle. The instrument is f*ked due to a silly electronics design error. We are very sorry, but that is all we can do about it.