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Colliding Galaxies Reveal Colossal Black Holes
Matt_dk writes "New observations made with the Submillimeter Array of telescopes in Hawaii suggest that black holes — thought to exist in many, if not all, galaxies — were common even in the early Universe, when galaxies were just beginning to form. Astronomers have found two very different galaxies in the distant Universe, both with colossal black holes at their hearts, involved in a spectacular collision."
I saw it. It is a press release. I even googled for a image of the spectacular collision; no joy. You be better off reading Finnegan's Wake. Though I prefer Conrad's Heart of Darkness.
http://arxiv.org/abs/0808.2188
4C60.07 - the first of the galaxies to be discovered - came to astronomers' attention because of its bright radio emission. This radio signature is one telltale sign of a quasar - a black hole, spinning rapidly, feeding on its parent galaxy. A new image captures the moment, approximately 12 billion years ago, when this galaxy ripped a stream of dusty gas from a neighbour.
"This new image reveals two galaxies where we only expected to find one," said Professor Rob Ivison ... "Remarkably, both galaxies contain super-massive black holes, each capable of powering a billion, billion, billion light bulbs. The implications are wide reaching: you can't help wondering how many other colossal black holes may be lurking unseen in the distant Universe?"
Due to the finite speed of light, we see the two galaxies as they collided in the distant past, less than 2 billion years after the Big Bang. By now the galaxies will have merged to create a football-shaped elliptical galaxy. Their black holes are likely to have merged to form a single monstrously large black hole.
"These two galaxies are fraternal twins. Both are about the size of the Milky Way, but each one is unique"
From the thats-a-lot-of-lightbulbs department?
Pictures??? Video is better! Ok a simulation is better than nothing. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xVgPplOgB1g
Look for Xrays and you will see them.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
Found a site with an article about this and it even has a picture...
http://www.stfc.ac.uk/KE/Ind/SubArrBH.aspx
Coldmoon over Dark water...
The accretion disks glow. Actually, the black hole glows, but at a temperature far too low to care, thanks to Hawking Radiation.
http://curious.astro.cornell.edu/question.php?number=274
seems a good explanation to me ( the stretching sheet rubber part at least, or how things can grow apart without adding more rubber )
The picture is not a photograph, it is an artist's imagining of the event, and not a very good one at that.
And for anyone else who was fooled, when the parent says "picture" he means it.
It is not a photograph. It is a rendition of what some artist thinks it'd look like.
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
If the universe is smaller than its Schwarzschild radius, it should collapse into a singularity. It hasn't, so it apparently isn't.
As mentioned here, the concept of a Schwarzschild radius is one limiting case of Einstein's equations of general relativity. It is a useful concept with various rules-of-thumb, but one must be careful in applying it to all situations. In particular, the approximation breaks down, and a full treatment using the equations of general relativity is instead necessary, for "extreme" situations (like inside a black hole, during the big bang, when applied to the entire universe, etc.).
More specifically (this site seems to explain it somewhat), the "Schwarzschild black hole" is just one solution to the equations of general relativity--it is a limiting case for nominally static matter (that is also non-rotating, spherically symmetric). Other solutions are required in other cases (e.g. the Kerr solution for rotating black holes). The Schwarzschild solution doesn't apply to dynamic systems (e.g. rapidly expanding matter). In particular the big bang and subsequent expansion of the universe represent a different solution to the equations of GR. This solution provides for a roughly flat space but massive expansion (hence highly curved spacetime, as one would expect for such high mass-density). Our best understanding suggests that inflation occurred (where space was expanding faster than the speed of light, although light/energy/matter/information was still constrained by c).
In my previous post I was just pointing out that the expected size for the Schwarzschild radius is very large. However that is based on a naive application of the usual rules-of-thumb. The big bang, if you will, is extreme enough that it requires a more careful treatment. Moreover, our best data right now suggests that the universe is roughly flat and infinite (and thus with infinite or at least extremely large mass), meaning that there is probably no meaningful way to apply the "Schwarzschild radius" concept to it.
Disclaimer: I'm not a cosmologist. Hopefully I didn't make a mistake.