More Blackholes Discovered...

Lispy writes "Space.com has this story about the surprising finding of missing blackholes. There might be up to five times more blackholes in space than previously estimated. "The European Southern Observatory in Munich, Germany reports that the black holes were all in "active" galaxies, meaning they were actively consuming large quantities of galactic matter.""

Comments

Wrong.

[Anonymous Coward]

Although some say that these black holes account for the "missing matter" that is needed for the universe to gravitationally collapse upon itself some hundreds of billions of years in the future, current analysis shows that the mass of all black holes are less than one trillionth of the mass of the universe.

Even if there are a thousand more times the number of black holes out there, it still won't account for the so-called "missing mass".

Of course, there could be many million times more black holes out there. Or some other large masses that we have yet to find. In any case, this 2-to-5 times the number of black holes isn't the (possible) mass we're looking for.

Re:What if

[Mister Transistor]

As far as we know, black holes result from the collapse of a star. They don't just "appear" for no reason. The new ones discovered were obscured by their accretion disks and the torus of gas and matter surrounding them.

That's like saying what if dead bodies suddenly started appearing everywhere - without there having been live people first. Corpses don't just "appear" out of nowhere, they have to be made :)