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Supermassive Black Holes Not So Big After All
An anonymous reader writes "Supermassive black holes are between 2 and 10 times less massive than previously thought, according to new calculations published by German astrophysicists (abstract)."
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but they are still super massive right? If not that totally ruins most of my celestial bodies jokes.
You mean, they're only hundreds of millions to a billion times the mass of the sun, not several billion times the mass of the sun? Sheesh! Talk about phoning it in! Wake me up when they're serious about being 'super massive'!
How can something be X-times less massive than something else? I can understand half as massive, or 1/10 as massive, but two to ten times less massive doesn't make any mathematical sense for a result that must be a positive number.
This shows that science is just a mass of arbitrary assertions.
This abject, craven, flip flopping about face allows me to justifiably substitute my own preferred notions into the debate as fact.
This effectively proves that global warming, vaccination, evolution, and all other liberal plots are bald faced lies.
Its an outrage! If scientists can revise their theories based on improved evidence, science is untrustworthy claptrap that must be excluded from debate.
Will MUSE release a followup called "Not So Supermassive - Black Hole"
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
Treating these as classical black holes, they would only be less massive, not less dense. Classical black holes have diverging density due to collapse of a finite mass to a singularity. If you propose that black holes have internal structure then it's reasonable to suggest that differences in density could result.
How would this relate to theories of dark matter? I don't know what formulas they use to determine this so would this lessen the necessity for dark matter or exacerbate the problem further (more dark matter than previously thought), if said formulas are accurate?
Then we do the same. The interesting results from this paper is a relationship between the spectra of the active galatic nucleus(AGN), which we infer to be a so-called black hole, the motion of the the AGN, and the geometry of the AGN. Given the inferred rotational velocity, the mass of central black-hole can be derived. If all this is true, the mass would be at most an order of magnitude less than previously thought. An order of magnitude correction is significant. It gives us something to test to confirm the assertions of the author. OTHO, I do not see that, in the absence of further work, these results are to be taken at face value that there is an order of magnitude discrepancy in the mass of these AGN.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Well, it's nice to know that something in the Universe now sucks less.
"Gas can potentially corrupt results"
Yes it can... especially on a first date.
Scientists would do everyone a favor if they dropped the formula "we used to think, but now we know".
Kinda hard to drop something that's never been used.
I could have dismissed this as the reporting being at fault, but the abstract ends with "Knowing the rotational velocities, we can derive the central black-hole masses more accurately; they are two to ten times smaller than has been estimated previously."
Emphasis added. Hope that helps with your parsing problem.