First Science From A Virtual Observatory

mindpixel writes "I first mentioned Virtual Observatories in my July 2000 Slashdot interview. Now, nearly four years later, Spacetelescope.org is reporting a European team has used the Astrophysical Virtual Observatory (AVO) to find 30 supermassive black holes that had previously escaped detection behind masking dust clouds. The identification of this large population of long-sought 'hidden' black holes is the first scientific discovery to emerge from a Virtual Observatory. The result suggests that astronomers may have underestimated the number of powerful supermassive black holes by as much as a factor of five."

Comments

Re:Call it what it is:

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, but "database" doesn't sound as cool as "Virtual Observatory".

Re:My first question

[Anonymous Coward]

The gravitational force of black holes is irrelevant on cosmic scales at which dark energy matters. The most massive black holes have a mass of 10^10th solar masses. An average galaxy has a mass of ten times that. So the pull of the black hole's gravity is really only felt by the stars which are close to the black hole. As soon as you get further away than a few 1000 lightyears, the gravity of the stars and dark matter in the galaxy completely dominates that of the black hole.

Re:You know what would be cool?

[mindstrm]

Isn't that precisely what the article is about?

Re:GenBank

[CaptainAvatar]

Well ... I see what you are saying - in genetics, the Gs, As, Ts and Cs are the raw data. Fair enough (although surely there are levels of data more raw than that). But perhaps we are not comparing like with like. In a sense gene sequencing is a subset of chemistry - when you come down to it, these are just molecules - particularly important, fascinating and complex molecules, but molecules nonetheless. But geneticists aren't interested in all molecules, not are they interested in all chemical properties of the molecules they are interested in. Therefore, when they do their thing, they discard anything and everything which is irrelevant to them, abstracting it all down to combinations of G/A/T/C. But there might be other interesting things in their original samples - other new molecules, a cure for cancer, who knows what. In fact, we'll never know, because all we have is a gene sequence and that's all that goes into GenBank. Astronomers do the same; if they are looking for galaxies, they ignore the foreground stars (and vice versa).

But with a virtual observatory, there is no such filtering going on. So you can use that data to look for almost anything you like - asteroids, variable stars, MACHOs, gravitational lenses - whereas an astronomical equivalent of GenBank would only let you look for new galaxies (or some other equally narrow subset of all astronomical objects). Having looked at your homepage I realise that genomics is your field and it's certainly not mine, so I apologise if I have egregiously mischaracterised its scope.

BTW, I enjoyed your scientific genealogy! I can trace mine via P.A.M. Dirac to Ralph Fowler, who as it happens was Rutherford's son-in-law. I also have people like Fred Hoyle, Stephen Hawking and the current Astronomer Royal in my scientific family tree. But as I only have a master's, I am probably illegitimate or something ...