Hundreds of Black Holes Roam Loose In Milky Way

sciencehabit writes "From Science: 'Astronomers suspect that hundreds of medium-sized black holes are roaming loose in the Milky Way. These rogues, according to a new study, are the orphaned central black holes of the many smaller galaxies that the Milky Way has swallowed over its billions of years of existence.'"

Comments

First swine flu, now loose-roaming black holes?

[adnonsense]

Anything else we need to be worrying about?

Re:First swine flu, now loose-roaming black holes?

[miffo.swe]

Global warming, fundamentalist christian, jews, muslims, poisonous food additives,and a global echonomic collaps can be a good start. :D

Re:First swine flu, now loose-roaming black holes?

[Anonymous Coward]

His parent mentioned it in the post title.

Re:First swine flu, now loose-roaming black holes?

[sgbett]

How could you forget "Terrorism" more like.

Re:First swine flu, now loose-roaming black holes?

[Nephrite]

Looks like everyone has already forgot the LHC...

Re:First swine flu, now loose-roaming black holes?

[sadness203]

These roaming black holes are the legacy of old civilization from other planet... testing their own LHC, before being sucked into oblivion.

And someone, somewhere, must be watching and laughing.

Re:First swine flu, now loose-roaming black holes?

[mrsquid0]

And the biggest risk that most of us face, getting hit by a car on the way to work.

Re:First swine flu, now loose-roaming black holes?

[Opportunist]

At least you left out all the conspiracy crap, like alien invasions, mind control probes and terrorism.

Re:First swine flu, now loose-roaming black holes?

[Opportunist]

That's what has puzzled me to no end since the onset of various hypes. SARS? Your chance to catch it? Play the lottery if you do, your chance for a jackpot is higher. Mad cow? Ditto. Terrorism? 3000 affected of roughly 200 million (directly, not due to the political fallout). Swine/bird flu?

And now compare that to the chance of a heart attack. Lung cancer. Getting run over by a car. Getting mugged. And various freak accidents that happen all the time.

It's a miracle that you're still alive! And it's not because of black holes, not because of terrorism, not because of pandemics. It's because you're living.

Your alternative is to spend your life under your bed. But then again, where's the difference to being dead already?

Re:First swine flu, now loose-roaming black holes?

[Anonymous Coward]

BLASPHEMER!!!!!

Re:First swine flu, now loose-roaming black holes?

[doti]

Because terrorism is nothing to be worried about?

Re:First swine flu, now loose-roaming black holes?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not that. The government and it's agencies MUST overreact to these things, or at least hype the media up to let them know they are doing "everything they can" in light of the unfortunate turn of events Katrina caused. Because we didn't overreact at that time, a sh**load of angry black people came out of the woodwork looking for a FEMA handout because Kanye announced Bush hates black people. Now don't flame the comment as racist, it's not, but it was a very dynamic situation that people capitalized on to scam the government for handouts after the fact. If one kid, Asian, Black, Latino, White, (whatever) dies from this, there will be some lawyer telling those parents "Go get the government, they don't like you anyway, let's get rich" he takes a percentage and we keep paying taxes.

Re:First swine flu, now loose-roaming black holes?

[kid_oliva]

Parent should be rated "Funny", not Informative. Didn't you notice the ":D" at the end. It is called sarcasm. Now please rate me Informative as I have explained the previous post. Thank you. :D

Re:First swine flu, now loose-roaming black holes?

[mrsquid0]

> Your alternative is to spend your life under your bed. But then
> again, where's the difference to being dead already?

I am not going to spend my life under my bed. That's where the monsters live.

Re:First swine flu, now loose-roaming black holes?

[PhxBlue]

Your alternative is to spend your life under your bed. But then again, where's the difference to being dead already?

About six feet. *Rimshot!*

Re:First swine flu, now loose-roaming black holes?

[cpartrid]

I'm curious as to what exactly Partially Infinite means?
Just another way of saying: Not infite?
Or its not quite inifite yet, but it will be?
Or does it mean that some of it is infinte but other bits aren't?

Black holes can certainly roam. They are no different from other interstellar bodies in that respect.

Re:First swine flu, now loose-roaming black holes?

[jeffshoaf]

At least you left out all the conspiracy crap, like alien invasions, mind control probes and terrorism.

That's because the alien conspiracy has already used their mind control probes to make him forget about terrorism.

Re:First swine flu, now loose-roaming black holes?

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree with you about terrorism, etc but...

> SARS? Your chance to catch it? Play the lottery if you do, your chance for a jackpot is higher. Mad cow? Ditto

You're using some hindsight there and really missing the history of the events.

* SARS -- brand new virus, very high fatality rate initially (higher than spanish flu, for example) and seemed likely to be very spreadable: went from unknown to thousands of cases VERY quickly. In many respects looked like a probably pandemic.

What spared us: most people turned out to not be all that contagious, but for some reason a few people were REALLY contagious ("superspreaders") This meant that public health measures were very effective: once people stopped circulating and speading it all over it burned itself out pretty quickly.

* Mad cow: England had been having BSE infections among cattle for awhile... and when they got a downed cow they'd just kill it and use its offal to make more cow food. This unwittingly caused BSE to spread all throughout the island. By the time it was done the whole herd needed to be destroyed.

When it first started causing disease in humans there was VERY good reason to be concerned: millions had been exposed to the tainted beef, the gestation period for the disease was years long, and there was no real hope of developing a treatment. At first there was a distinct possibility that the human fatalities would be enormous. Luckily, this did not pan out.. within a few years of eliminating the tainted beef from the food supply the human cases slowed to a trickle.

I'd definitely agree that anyone worried about mad cow TODAY isn't being rational. There will probably always be the occasional cow that randomly comes down with BSE but as long as you don't feed cows to other cows and don't let sick cows into the human food supply, the chances of it ever spreading to another human are low.

Finally, pandemics are REAL: less than a century ago a single flu pandemic killed 2-3% of EVERYONE ON THE PLANET. Based on the history of the last few centuries I'd guess you probably have a ~1% chance of meeting your end to one. Sure, this isn't as high on the list as heart disease or cancer but it's not negligible either. (Plus a pandemic event would have massive societal effects for the survivors)

In short, don't be cocky just because we've dodged the last couple bullets. The wrong virus is still capable of ruining everybody's year.

Re:First swine flu, now loose-roaming black holes?

[bugeaterr]

Global warming, fundamentalist christian, jews, muslims, poisonous food additives,and a global echonomic collaps can be a good start. :D

Nothing a rogue black hole can't fix, or at least make a LOT smaller.

Re:First swine flu, now loose-roaming black holes?

[sgbett]

note capital 'T'

Terrorism
-noun
Terrorism adj. use by the media to sensationalise otherwise typical occurances into newsworth articles.
1. the use of panic and ignorance to intimidate or coerce, esp. for political purposes
2. the state of fear and submission produced by government or governance
3. a Terroristic method of reporting or of interpreting news reports.

terrorism
-noun
1. the use of violence and threats to intimidate or coerce, esp. for political purposes.
2. the state of fear and submission produced by terrorism or terrorization.
3. a terroristic method of governing or of resisting a government.

Re:First swine flu, now loose-roaming black holes?

[JTsyo]

No, the black hole will just make the problems last a lot longer while we wait at the event horizon.

Re:First swine flu, now loose-roaming black holes?

[YttriumOxide]

Well, I would like to know, if a black hole comes by, does it actually pull a whole planet into its hole, do we know if this is possible...

If it has sufficient gravity, then yes, it is quite capable of "swallowing" a planet. Any black hole that formed in the "usual way" from a collapsing star, certainly has enough gravity (pretty much exactly the same as the star that it was before it collapsed) to suck in a nearby planet if the planet is unfortunate enough to be nearby. Of course, that's only really a problem with these "wandering" black holes - if our sun was mystically replaced with an equally massive black hole (which would be MUCH smaller in size), then the planets would continue to go around it exactly as they do now (although we'd all die from freezing since the hole isn't putting out heat like our sun does, but that's another matter entirely)

I mean at the core a small start implodes and turns into a black hole, but does it have enough strength to suck in another star, or even a whole solar system...

Again, depends on the size (gravity) of the hole, but generally yes - put two stars on a collision course and it'll be pretty nasty.

and what happens if you put 2 black holes side by side, do they cancel each other out...sort of like putting a bag of holding inside a bag of holding...?

Nope, they'd just "merge" in to one bigger one. So, two that had a mass of x, would become a single one with a mass of 2x.

Black holes are pretty weird and there's a lot of strange physics around them when you get deep in to it, but at the very basic level, they're not particularly odd at all - just think of them as objects with a REALLY large mass for their size (but still no larger than many other objects around, such as stars (of course, holes that used to be galactic centres are generally a bit bigger, since our best theories regarding black hole galactic centres involve a LOT of matter going in to creating them)).

Re:First swine flu, now loose-roaming black holes?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, let's see....

There's the coordinated attack on secondary school science standards, their constant attempts to destroy the recognition of church-state separation, their bigoted hate-speech enflaming public opinon against the minority du-jour (especially in Europe), violence against medical care providers, violence against homosexuals, violence against other religious adherents, their routine attempts to repeal various freedoms and rights....

Just because they kill fewer people than other fanatics doesn't make them harmless.

Also, I'd like to go ahead and pre-empt whoever wants to pull the "but the people that do those things are a minority!" by pointing out that nobody ever specified in what quantity they exist nor ranked them in relation to other threats.

Re:First swine flu, now loose-roaming black holes?

[impaledsunset]

You all seem to be missing more immediate worries. You forgot to include women. I thought an average slashdotter wouldn't leave out such a major treat.

Re:First swine flu, now loose-roaming black holes?

[Jesus_666]

That's right! Why use the LHC to create black holes when we can simply fetch one of those already flying around everywhere? Reduce, reuse, recycle.

Re:First swine flu, now loose-roaming black holes?

[Anonymous Coward]

Only to the external observer! The rest of us in the black hole will fly along at our usual speeds. Though I imagine a permanent snapshot of us in our current state will not impress the rest of the universe. :-(

Re:First swine flu, now loose-roaming black holes?

[Ajaxamander]

such a major treat.

Freudian typo? t{h}reat?

Re:First swine flu, now loose-roaming black holes?

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's not forget fine christian organizations like the Ku Klux Klan and the IRA. Not to mention the eight years the US just went through being run by a religious fanatic who had people tortured, killed thousands of US troops and many, many thousands of foreigners, mostly civilians.

Re:First swine flu, now loose-roaming black holes?

[Shakrai]

What other kind of terrorists do we have?

Eco-terrorists. Domestic terrorists who aren't motivated by religion (OKC bombing).

Re:First swine flu, now loose-roaming black holes?

[GodfatherofSoul]

Longer? From YOUR reference point maybe...

Re:First swine flu, now loose-roaming black holes?

[jc42]

... add up ALL the various possible dangers, and the odds of it happening in a given year...odds of getting hit by lighting, 1:22 million. Odds of being in a car accident 1:50,000, etc, etc...I suspect that once you compiled a comprehensive list, you'd end up being nearly certain you'll die in the next year.

A few years back, I read an interesting article whose authors pretty much did just that, and wrote about the conclusions. One of their more interesting ways of expressing the results of the study was: Suppose that medical science found a way to eliminate aging, so that we all stayed permanently in the state of health of a person in their 20s, and only died of things at the rate that 25-year-olds died of them. How much would this increase our expected lifespan? The answer turned out to be about 15 years.

It put an interesting perspective on a lot of the hype around various medical scare stories. Yes, we do get older and feebler, and it'd be nice if we could fix that. But such medical advances by themselves wouldn't actually increase our lifespan by much. To do that, we have to fix the zillions of (mostly unlikely) things that would keep killing us off at a low rate.

I don't think black holes were on their list of dangers, though. And what we know of the history our planet tells us that asteroid impacts are a more significant danger.

Re:First swine flu, now loose-roaming black holes?

[jc42]

A couple of years ago, there was an astronomy news story about the discovery that our nearest spiral-galaxy neighbor, the Andromeda Galaxy, has two large black holes (with masses of several million sols) in its core. This explained some of the anomalies in that galaxy's shape, which isn't quite as flat or symmetrical as you'd expect a big spiral to be. The suggested explanation is a merger with another galaxy that probably happened several billion years ago, long enough that the resulting mess has settled down into what at first glance looks like a single normal spiral galaxy.

This isn't at all unusual, though. There are lots of galactic collisions visible in space. There was a fun one a few days ago on the Astronomy Picture of the Day site. Stories on them generally explain that few if any of the stars collide, because they're too far apart. The dust and gas clouds do collide, and the result is a period of star formation. In many cases, simulations show that the galaxies merge, typically producing an elliptical galaxy if both were large and had different orientations. In the Andromeda case, they were probably roughly coplanar, so the merger just produced a slightly bigger spiral.

Another recent story is about calculations showing that the Andromeda and Milky Way galaxies are on a collision course, and will collide in several billion years. The result may look a lot like the above picture to astronomers in other nearby galaxies.

Astronomers have also found the remnants of several smaller galaxies that our Milky Way has gobbled up. They were generally disrupted, but most of the stars from a single such galaxy now have similar orbits, so each appears as a loose "stream" of stars with a thickening that corresponds to the core of the original small galaxy. It's likely that each such smaller galaxy contributed one or more "medium" black holes (with a few thousand solar masses) to our galaxy.

Anyway, this story isn't especially surprising to anyone who follows atronomy news.

It's the economy!

[Dutchmaan]

Perhaps all our money really WAS disappearing through a black hole!

Gamma ray bursts and high energy cosmic rays

[MichaelSmith]

I wonder if black holes could account for either of these things? Gamma rays would be released if a large mass hits a black hole. A cosmic ray could be accelerated if it passes too close to a black hole.

Re:Gamma ray bursts and high energy cosmic rays

[Anonymous Coward]

Gamma-ray bursts = an advanced civilization switching on its own LHC.

FTFS: The Milky Way Swallows

[Anonymous Coward]

My kind of galaxy!

Nah, I call BS

[DavidRawling]

Scenario. The Milky Way swallows a galaxy, and by extension, all the stars around the central black hole. Yet, the same gravity that causes the stars to amalgamate completely misses the biggest mass in that swallowed galaxy? Why would that make sense?

Re:Nah, I call BS

[MichaelSmith]

Scenario. The Milky Way swallows a galaxy, and by extension, all the stars around the central black hole. Yet, the same gravity that causes the stars to amalgamate completely misses the biggest mass in that swallowed galaxy? Why would that make sense?

The only bit which I think is strange is that the black hole from the swallowed galaxy hangs around in our galaxy. It should have enough velocity to pass right through our galaxy and never come back. Most likely the captured stars would die of old age before they passed though our galaxy. Only red dwarfs would keep going because of their long life. Gas clouds in the captured galaxy would interact with our gas clouds. I think that is the only component which would really get captured.

Re:Nah, I call BS

[Brown]

The Milky Way swallows a galaxy, and the swallowed galaxy's stars get added to the milky way, orbiting the galactic centre in the usual way. Presumably the same happens to the black hole - there's no reason why it should be sucked into the middle. Black holes will happily orbit around each other, as long as they're outside each other's event horizons.

Re:Nah, I call BS

[markusre]

since the gravitation force is ~M_blackhole*M_milkyway and F_bh=m_bh*a i dont think the trajectorie is dependent on the mass of the particle in the first order as long as m_bhm_milkyway

Re:Nah, I call BS

[MichaelSmith]

Why would the stars and black hole change their trajectory significantly?

Gravity?

Gravity can change the direction of travel of a black hole or star. It can't significantly change momentum unless the object passes very close to a large mass. Our space probes do that at Jupiter, etc, but that requires guidance or an extreme amount of luck. To be captured by gravitational slingshot a black hole would have to pass very close to our own central black hole. Thats not very likely.

Re:Nah, I call BS

[AlecC]

Because the galaxy is not a point mass. Most ordinary star/planet modelling is based on viewing each object as a sphere, which behaves as a point mass at the centre. But when you penetrate inside another body, as two galaxies do when they collide, this simplification no longer applies. Some of the mass of the "other" galaxy moves behind the penetrating galaxy, slowing it down rather than, as the point mass model would suggest, continuing to accelerate into the centre. In the simplest model, of inter-penetrating spheres, gravity no longer has an inverse square law but an inverse linear law. Of course, galaxies are not uniform spheres, and the modelling is much harder. However, it is widely accepted that when two galaxies collide, they merge and the vast majority of the mass forms a single galaxy - though clusters may be flung out. If the galaxies are of broadly similar masses, the distinctive spiral structure is wiped out and the merged result becomes an elliptical galaxy for a few hundred million years before the spiral structure re-establishes.

Google "andromeda collisions" for simulations of the collision between our galaxy and the Andromeda galaxy in about 3 billion years.

Re:Nah, I call BS

[stonewallred]

What happens when two black holes actually intersect at their event horizons? Inquiring non-astrophysicists would like to know.

Re:Nah, I call BS

[beanyk]

What happens when two black holes actually intersect at their event horizons? Inquiring non-astrophysicists would like to know.

They merge into one bigger hole. The final hole mass will be (almost) the sum of the two masses, and will likely have a significant spin, even if the pre-merger holes don't.

Disclaimer: this is actually my area of research.

Re:Nah, I call BS

[beanyk]

Well for one thing, the "time moving slowly" thing is an observer-dependent effect. If you were the one falling into the hole, you wouldn't notice any real time lag at all [depending on the size of the hole -- and your personal oxygen supply, etc -- you might even survive crossing the horizon].

But to a distant observer, your progress would look more and more gradual. Signals leaving you would also get more and more red-shifted, and eventually pass out of the visible spectrum. So a distant observer would never see you cross the horizon.

Re:Nah, I call BS

[Shakrai]

But when you penetrate inside another body

There aren't too many slashdotters that can relate to your analogy. May I suggest a car one instead? ;)

Milky Way?

[krou]

If I found hundreds of "black holes" in my "Milky Way", surely that would mean it's an Aero?

I'll grab my coat ...

Re:Milky Way?

[L4t3r4lu5]

Well, if the universe is expanding in a uniform fashion, the perimeter in all directions must be equidistant from the centre.

I think you mean a Malteser.

Yes but how does this relate to Swine Flu?

[VShael]

And how can the news networks use it to induce fear?
And more importantly, how we can we use it to sell stuff?

"Black hole protective face-masks" just don't seem like a seller, to me.

Re:Yes but how does this relate to Swine Flu?

[PolygamousRanchKid]

The Black Holes were created by the Large Hadron Collider during the short time that it was online, before the radioactive liquid helium leaked out and freeze-burned its way down toward the center of the earth (China Syndrome), where it was reflected back up and surfaced in a pig patch in Mexico, and irradiated sick pigs with Swine Flu, which mutated into the Mexico Flu, and hopped a ride on some poor little kid, who passed it on to Mexico city.

Seems all pretty plausible to me.

Are they absolutely sure?

[hack slash]

Take this wise lesson from Red Dwarf:

"Well, the thing about a Black Hole, its main distinguishing feature, is it's black. And the thing about space, your basic space colour is black. So how are you supposed to see them?"

*later on*

"They weren't Black Holes."
"What were they?"
"Grit. Five specks of grit on the scanner-scope. See, the thing about grit is, it's black, and the thing about scanner-scopes..."
"Oh shut up!"

Re:Are they absolutely sure?

[GodfatherofSoul]

I vote for Buck Rogers to be remade like BSG, who's with me?

A few years ago, I watched a cheesy rerun with Wilma posing as a hooker to sneak into some fat-cat's hotel room. Oh my! She was SMOKIN' back in the day! I just never picked up on that as a kid.

What About Black Holes from Common Massive Stars?

[Fleetie]

What about black holes NOT from the centre of galaxies? Fairly normal large (massive) stars end up as black holes too, so I'd expect a lot of black holes in this galaxy anyway, even if it hadn't interacted with any other galaxies.

The Republicans are at it again ...

[MasterRat]

Its obvious, that in order to be more eco-friendly and healthy, the central-black holes in democratically controlled galaxies have gone free-range to avoid contributing to universal warming. Its the damn republican black hole at the center of the Milky Way, sitting there, denying universal climate change that needs to be shown the error the of its ways. I say, lets raise taxes on republican black holes so that we can share the wealth and help the black holes in poorer, predominantly democratic galaxies become empowered, thus giving them the opportunity to become free-range black holes.

I think I found one

[hyades1]

I'm reasonably sure there's one in my ex's purse. Money goes there to die.

Just remember ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the drug store, but that's just peanuts to space.

and Cheney got black hole funding cut

[jollyreaper]

For the love of Christ, Republicans! You know that line about anti-zombie research? Don't fucking touch it! You saw what happened when you cut funding for volcano and pandemic flu research!

undefined

[Scubafish]

3. a Terroristic method of reporting or of interpreting news reports.

2. the state of fear and submission produced by terrorism or terrorization.

3. a terroristic method of governing or of resisting a government.

You cannot define terrorism with the word terrorism.

That's like saying var x = x; Terrorism is undefined.

Re:undefined

[Headcase88]

I wasn't familiar with dictionary.com, but they did a great job of providing a textbook example of how not to define a word. Merriam-Webster has a better definition:
The systematic use of terror especially as a means of coercion.

And in turn, the terror definitions that fit with this are:
1: a state of intense fear
4: violent or destructive acts (as bombing) committed by groups in order to intimidate a population or government into granting their demands