Black Hole Sans Donut Puzzles Astronomers

Anonymous Squonk writes: "This time, a telescope made news by not finding something. According to this Honolulu Star-Bulletin article, a black hole was found that did not contain the expected 'donut' of warm matter swirling around it. This discovery (or lack of discovery) may lead scientists to rethink what they know about the core of active galaxies."

Comments

Is it my imagination...

[tonyc.com]

Or has almost every astrophysics-related story I've seen lately included something like "this discovery will force scientists to rethink everything they know about [insert specialty here]?"

Is this a requirement for continued research funding? Or is our understanding of astrophysics in general so incomplete that none of our theories form a coherent system that can stand the addition of even one more observation?

I have been bitchslapped, and must use another ip!

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not really surprising that some black holes don't match the canonical form. They draw the matter in the torus from the surrounding galaxy, so any galaxies with unusual properties would affect the black hole. The article doesn't give many details about the M87 galaxy or how much research has been conducted on it, and since noone bothered to look for a black hole torus in it before, there may be other related phenomena yet to be discovered.

Re:Not necessarily

[MousePotato]

good points and thanks for the tip on the book.

My theory, albeit an unedumacted one, is that this may be a wormhole rather than a classic singularity/core type. The terms may be wrong but I think you get my idea of it being a conduit to another point in warped/folded space versus a "crush everything it can suck in to some insanely massive yet small space" type of black hole. All we need to do is look to see if there is an 'other end' to it.

This may be one of the coolest discoveries yet :)

Astronomers are always being surprised

[Anton Anatopopov]

It seems that the more we learn about our Universe, the less we can be certain about it. I remember when they first detected the background radiation from the 'big bang'. That was a big upset because it wasn't behaving how astronomers thought it should.

Then there was the whole 'dark matter' brouhaha. It seems to me that Astronomers need to formulate some new models of space and time, to account for all these anomolies, Perhaps professor Stephen Hawking holds the key to this...

Re:Astronomers are always being surprised

[DullTrev]

Well, of course astronomers are always being surprised. This field, which essentially relates to observational cosmology, is incredibly young. Observational cosmology only really started with Hubble (the man, not the machine...). When you think of how long other sections of physics have been going, this is a minute amount of time.

Astronomy itself is ancient, but this has essentially been only data-collection, rather than trying to understand the processes. It has been more like botany than biology - a taxonomic exercise rather than a science. Now we have the instruments so that theories we formulate can be tested observationally, so we are bound to have a lot of theories lost along the way.

Remember, only a hundred or so years ago, we thought the sun was acually combusting - burning some fuel in a chemical reaction with oxygen! Don't be surprised if theories change - perhaps we are missing some fundamental information. In fact, most cosmologists would say we definitely are - they know that the present system of physics we have breaks down in 'extreme' situations. And a black hole most definitely counts as extreme.