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."

Comments

*phew*

[AlphaDrake]

I was scared I might have run into one in a dark alley one night, thank goodness they have been found. On a more serious note, the article mentions that "the galaxies are 9-11 billion years old, and that they *did* exist when the universe was in it's adolescence." Does this mean they are no longer there? And if not, what would have become of the black holes?

pics or it didn't happen

[weirdcrashingnoises]

"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."

pfft yea sure, i'll believe it's a black hole when i see it.

It's just grit on the scanner scope...

[Artega VH]

As covered by Red Dwarf...
"Well, the thing about a Black Hole, its main distinguishing feature, is it's black! And the thing about space, the colour of space, yer basic space colour, is its Black! So how are you supposed to see them. ... We've been in space for three million years and there hasn't been one! Then, all of a sudden five of them turn up at once!"

And the cause of all these black holes?
"Five specs of grit on the scanner scope....the thing is about Grit... is it's black.."

Re:Question

[NeoSkink]

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.

Re:Question

[mazarin5]

I read somewhere that if the sun were to compress to a black hole tomorrow, we'd still be orbiting. Makes sense, but semi counterintuitive (but I thought all black holes sucked?! etc). Quite true. The big deal with black holes is that the escape velocity exceeds the speed of light, at some radius that is larger than the object. The distance at which the escape velocity is equal to the speed of light is called the Schwarzchild radius. If the Sun were a black hole, that radius would be about 3 km. Everything outside of that would be fine.

google example Replace the mass with any interesting value.