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New Family of Black Holes Found
RobertFisher writes "NASA has just released a press release about an important new family of black holes. From the release, "The previously undiscovered black holes provide an important link that sheds light on the way black holes grow. Even more odd, these new black holes were found in the cores of glittering, 'beehive' swarms of stars -- called globular star clusters -- that orbit our Milky Way and other galaxies." Amazingly, these black holes have a mass proportional to their host cluster, a trend also observed in supermassive black holes ten thousand times more massive. Nature is giving us some big clues here."
Yes and no. Because black holes aren't exactly "descendants" of something, it's not like you can say that one kind of black hole is related or unrelated to another kind of black hole.
However, from the tone of the article, it seems that these types of black holes--ones which reside in the center of "globular" galaxies--would have formed differently and at a different time than the larger black holes found at the center of "spiral" galaxies.
I guess a good example is a "pygmy" animal, such as the pygmy shrew (or, try here for a more accurate description), which is not a "smaller" version of the species but is its own species, related to the normal one.
I'm pretty sure that the conditions for these black holes would have to be different, since otherwise they would have caused the formation of spiral galaxies rather than globular ones. Any astronomers out there care to chime in?
Karma: Chevy Kavalierma.
The previously undiscovered black holes provide an important link that sheds light on the way black holes grow.
The light was then promptly swallowed into oblivion, leaving the researchers no bewildered and rather annoyed.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
One simply has to read the article detailing how to escape a black hole.
Unfortunatly RTFM might not be an option when your being rapidly dematerialized.
I live in a giant bucket.
Granted my physics is a tad rusty..
Previously, as I understood, there were small primordial black holes formed very early on in the universe (supernovae concussion wave resonnance and all that fun stuff) and then there were large black holes formed by stars above the Chandrasekhar limit (I.E. there's a lower limit on how small the black holes can be.).
The reason these are exciting is because they're too small to be formed by the normal gravitational collapse of a supermassive star, yet larger than we'd expect primordial black holes to be... and it's a bit flippant to just say they're primordial holes that have eaten a lot.
That's just my semi-educated guess on the matter... the article seems to assume the readers already know why we hadn't previously found any black holes of this size.
Simple Machines in Higher Dimensions