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Black Hole Found That Takes Up 14% of Its Galaxy's Mass
An anonymous reader sent word that astronomers have discovered an absolutely enormous black hole residing in a galaxy that seems too small for it. In a new study (PDF), researchers looked at galaxy NGC 1277 and found that its central black hole weighed in at roughly 17 billion solar masses. Quoting Phil Plait: "The problem is, that’s far more massive than the central bulge of NGC 1277 would suggest the black hole should be. It’s well over half the total mass of the bulge! In fact, the entire mass of the galaxy is about 120 billion solar masses, which means the black hole at its heart is 14 percent of the total galaxy’s mass; compare that to the Milky Way’s black hole mass of 0.01 percent and you’ll see why astronomers were shocked."
It's the largest black hole they've yet found, if the article I saw yesterday is correct.
Free Martian Whores!
This was in my local paper a week ago, is this supposed to be 'news'?
No, the news is that somebody is still reading a newspaper in 2012.
You don't need a license to counterfeit money. Print money, sure, but not to counterfeit money.
I wonder if, with a black hole as large and relatively less shielded, you can look for some evidence of relativistic effects around it.
that's an accretion disc.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
when you let the Walton Family take over a galaxy.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
From redditor xSmoothx post titled "Putting into perspective just how big the black hole of NGC 1277 truly is"
According to the arxiv pdf (http://arxiv.org/pdf/1211.6429.pdf) there is no strong evidence of it being stripped. Page 1, last paragraph on the right.
This is just an example of a MaCHO. We've theorized about them for a while. They are a strong candidate for a bulk of the dark matter we've detected. The other candidates are WIMPs.
America is all about speed. Hot, nasty, badass speed. -Eleanor Roosevelt, 1936
There are actually two kinds of missing matter at this point. Evidence based on things from the Big Bang like the cosmic microwave background and relative abundance of light elements gives us an idea what portion of the mass in the universe would be made up from baryonic matter (things like protons and neutrons, so pretty much anything made of atoms), and then there is a large portion of mass that needs to be made up of something else, that is what gets called dark matter. Of the portion we think that is baryonic matter, we have not observed enough material to account for that portion yet either. So it is expected, that if the those proportions are correct, that there is still a lot of regular mundane matter to be found out in the universe that without cutting into the dark matter portion. Black holes would be grouped with the baryonic stuff because it would get most of its mass from infalling regular matter (and if not, then it wouldn't really change much anyways).
There actually was and still are some searches for rogue or otherwise previously unobserved black holes around that would account for some of the missing matter. At one point, it was thought that the missing matter could have all been black holes (i.e. before they realized we need to find non-baryonic matter), and is when the MaCHo vs. WIMP debate was going on. But searches provided some upper bounds on the numbers black holes there can be roving around the galaxy, and they wouldn't be enough to account for a significant chunk of the missing matter anyway.
I would think it more likely that a supermassive blackhole was ejected by a galactic collision and landed in a dwarf galaxy where its living out its retirement. Hhhmmm, sounds vaguely like the Mel Gibson story...
I read (I think it was in 'death by black hole') that the more massive the black hole, the less gravity you experience at the event horizon. For a 1 trillion mass black hole, supposedly it would only have 10g at its event horizon. For still greater masses, you could have 1g, something reasonable for both a human and a spaceship to deal with... in theory, you could hover a ship with a person in it at the very boundary of such an event horizon... how sharp would this boundary be? I'd lower a string to see where and how it gets clipped.