Supermassive Diet: Black Holes Bulk-Up On Dark Matter

astroengine writes It has long been assumed that the size of a supermassive black hole in a galaxy's core is intimately related to the number of stars that galaxy contains — but it might not be that simple after all. According to new research, it may in fact be a galaxy's extensive dark matter halo that controls the evolution of the central supermassive black hole and not the total number of stars that galaxy contains. "There seems to be a mysterious link between the amount of dark matter a galaxy holds and the size of its central black hole, even though the two operate on vastly different scales," said lead author Akos Bogdan of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA), Cambridge, Mass.

Comments

Re:Jump That Gun

[towermac]

That mod got fixed. But don't be too smug in your theories. ;)

I been telling y'all for years. The dark matter is regular old matter that has fallen into the singularity, and is now off in one of those dimensions sting theory describes. It still 'there', it still exists, it has mass; the conservation of mass and energy will *always* be obeyed.

It's just that 'there' is kind of fuzzy, given that the singularity has no volume. It physically can't all be right there, and our measurements confirm that dark matter (we should call it dark gravity btw, because that's all we observe) does not emanate from the black hole at the center of a galaxy. The gravity we see from a black hole is mass that has not yet fallen into the singularity. And theoretically, that mass can't make it into the singularity since time approaches zero the closer you get.

I'm stuck there, on how the mass made it into the singularity in the first place, and the paradox that for a singularity to even exist, at least one bit of mass had to be compressed into a state that our known universe doesn't allow. But we do see the gravitational shadow it casts around a galaxy. Which I submit is the 'size' of that dimension.