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Monster Black Hole Busts Theory

Posted by samzenpus on from the old-bob-and-vincent dept.

Genocaust writes "A stellar black hole much more massive than theory predicts is possible has astronomers puzzled. Stellar black holes form when stars with masses around 20 times that of the sun collapse under the weight of their own gravity at the ends of their lives. Most stellar black holes weigh in at around 10 solar masses when the smoke blows away, and computer models of star evolution have difficulty producing black holes more massive than this. The newly weighed black hole is 16 solar masses. It orbits a companion star in the spiral galaxy Messier 33, located 2.7 million light-years from Earth. Together they make up the system known as M33 X-7."

5 of 248 comments (clear)

  1. Supermassive black holes by Raul654 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    If theory says that black holes beyond 10 solar masses cannot form, how do they explain the conjectured supermassive black holes at the center of our and other galaxies?

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    1. Re:Supermassive black holes by shawn(at)fsu · · Score: 5, Insightful

      They mentioned that in the article. Mister Scientist thinks their are different mechacisms at work that produce the super massive black holes at the centre of galaxies. I was wondering though, is it possible that a black hole of this mass could me produces in a trinary solar system where two black holes merge, in this case leaving you with a 16 solar masses and orbiting the remain star?

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    2. Re:Supermassive black holes by jd · · Score: 5, Insightful
      What if you have an n-ary system in which two or more supermassive stars are sufficiently close together that after the supernova, the total mass exceeds 10 solar masses even though no individual star did? (Since the star cores would merge at the common center of gravity, they would behave as a single remnant of the combined mass, NOT as individual collapsing objects.) Alternatively, if the black hole forms in a regular fashion but is in a dense enough zone - or a zone that has an obscenely large number of extra-solar supermassive planets - that it absorbs six or more solar masses before it can evaporate a comparable amount of mass, you'd reach the desired mass. Thirdly, my guess is that all simulations assume point singularities (probably the most common kind, assuming black hole theory is correct), which means that they won't be including Kerr Ring singularities or any of the other Really Weird Forms that have been predicted.

      I'm sure that there are ways to fudge things so that the desired mass can be reached. Or, there again, the simulations could be wrong. That happens, for all that Michael Fish wishes otherwise. Well, maybe not. He stands to make a lot of money from his new book because of that fiasco.

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    3. Re:Supermassive black holes by ZombieWomble · · Score: 3, Insightful

      That's something of a misleading post - while a "one second" black hole would indeed release such a huge amount of energy, the creation of such a black hole is unthinkable in the LHC: The energy the protons collide with is around 14TeV, or about 10^-6 joules. That's more than a billion billion billion times lower than the one second black hole you suggest in your post. The size of black holes produced in CERN would dissipate almost instantly, with a relatively small puff of particles.

  2. hmm by thatskinnyguy · · Score: 4, Insightful

    One black hole consumes another black hole creating one gigantic gravitational singularity. Case closed.

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