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Hundreds of Black Holes Found
eldavojohn writes "Hundreds of black holes that were thought to exist at the beginning of the universe have been found by NASA's Spitzer and Chandra space telescopes. From the article, 'The findings are also the first direct evidence that most, if not all, massive galaxies in the distant universe spent their youths building monstrous black holes at their cores. For decades, a large population of active black holes has been considered missing. These highly energetic structures belong to a class of black holes called quasars. A quasar consists of a doughnut-shaped cloud of gas and dust that surrounds and feeds a budding supermassive black hole. As the gas and dust are devoured by the black hole, they heat up and shoot out X-rays. Those X-rays can be detected as a general glow in space, but often the quasars themselves can't be seen directly because dust and gas blocks them from our view.' This is pretty big, as it's empirical evidence proving the existence of objects that theoretically had to exist but could not be detected previously."
Not to be pedantic, but couldn't there be another source for the x-rays? What would've happened if this was someones pet theory?
Racists, like conspiracy theorists, realize the truth of the world even though it runs contrary to dominant, irrational memes propagated by the opinion-makers of media.
There are plenty of racists with PhDs, including Harvard professors... the fact that moderators at a pop-culture geek site give a kneejerk negative response to any racialist post doesn't make it "stupid".
As with anything, really, the more popular the idea, the stupider it is -- so it is with the P.C. notion of ultimate equality and myopia with regard to hereditary intelligence and behavior.
Just because it's a black hole, doesn't mean it has to suck everything around it in. Stuff that's close enough, sure, but you can still get a stable orbit around a black hole, just like you can around any other collection of mass.
IANAA (I am not an astrophysicist)
Don't you think people the utility of abbreviations is kinda lost when you have to put the full thing in parens immediately following?
The question was: when did they form?
If a Black Hole is in a region with lots of material...it grows. Here's (roughly) how: most of material will orbit the black hole so the Black hole won't grow. BUT: if the density is high enough, it will form an orbiting disk of material. The particles in the disk will collide with each other in their mad dash around the black hole, heating the disk up, and knocking some of the material out of orbit, into the black hole. So you end up with the black hole growing, and an extremely hot disk shining X-rays across the Universe. This has been seen in more nearby quasars. Here they have found the X-rays from the more distant hot disks.
This discovery should be classified as excellend confirmation of what most astronomers thought must be true.
IANAP either, but it hardly takes one to quickly check the article. "The massive, growing black holes, discovered by NASA's Spitzer and Chandra space telescopes, represent a large fraction of a long-sought missing population." They key points here are 'long-sought' and 'missing population.' They knew there were more black holes out there than they had detected up until now. That suggests to me they took this into account as far as the dark matter theory goes.