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12-Billion-Solar-Mass Black Hole Discovered
sciencehabit writes: A team of astronomers has discovered what is, in galactic terms, a monstrous baby: a gigantic black hole of 12 billion solar masses in a barely newborn galaxy, just 875 million years after the big bang. It's roughly 3000 times the size of our Milky Way's central black hole. To have grown to such a size in so short a time, it must have been munching matter at close to the maximum physically possible rate for most of its existence. Its large size and rate of consumption also makes it the brightest object in that distant era, and astronomers can use its bright light to study the composition of the early universe: how much of the original hydrogen and helium from the big bang had been forged into heavier elements in the furnaces of stars.
My thoughts.
If something had to be doing the maximum possible for its entire existence to get that far, chances are that's not the maximum possible, or we're measuring something wrong.
Supermassive black holes have a different origin than stellar black holes
Anyway how big is it now (if it was 12 billion solar masses 12 billion years ago it must be pretty big now. Does this account for the missing dark matter?
"it must have been munching matter at close to the maximum physically possible rate"
That "maximum possible rate" sure sounds like bullshit.
Why does it sound like BS? Given that a huge fraction of the matter spiraling into the black hole is converted into energy before it falls in, that creates an outward pressure that limits how much more matter can follow. So there is a maximum rate that the black hole can accumulate mass.
Our galaxy is 1000 billion suns in mass. So this guy is 1.2% the mass of our entire galaxy. That's huge. By comparison, the black hole at the center of our galaxy is 4 million suns in mass.
Except black matter is required to explain how stars move within our own galaxy. One would think all those black holes would be spotted effecting light from stars in our galaxy if the cause of the effect was visible. Black matter is a placeholder to make the gravity equations work properly and no one has figured out yet what fills in that placeholder, or (probably less likely) if the equations are just wrong.
There is a maximum rate at which stuff can fall into a black hole, as stuff falls in it compresses and heats up. The more stuff you try to compress at the same time, the hotter it gets, the more black body radiation it emits, to the point that the light emitted would be strong enough to blow away any other stuff in the process of falling in. It is similar in concept to upper limits for the size of stars, where the heat produced at the center of the star will create a light pressure exceeding the gravity holding the star together.
These are not hard boundaries, like the speed of light in relativity. The exact circumstances and external factors can increase or decrease the limit a little, or limits can be exceeded for short periods of time before things setting into some quasi-equilibrium. But there is still a rough limit, and you're not going to see it violated by large amounts unless the theories involved are wrong.
I did not realise that bankers were around as early as 875 million years after the big bang.
"...munching matter at close to the maximum physically possible rate for most of it's existence." One of their physicists must be really good at yo momma jokes.
The black hole in question is eating matter near the rate of what is theorized to be the limit of how fast a black hole can consume matter. We've really never seen anything like it. ~875,000,000 is very young for such a structure to be so big in a universe that young. Anyway, when it is said that it is the brightest object in that part and time of the universe, we are speaking of the "extra bright" event horizon: the point where matter is super heated before tumbling into the singularity itself. Since it's all one dense gravitationally bound structure, the event horizon is part of the whole. The great part of this discovery is that it allows us to take a peek at ratios of elements such as hydrogen and helium relative to heavier elements in a still pretty young universe.
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
Yea, but it cannot do it for it's whole life without stopping to rest...
Yes it can. As long as it steps on a landmine before getting tired.
"the space is at 100% of its capacity to hold matter" You can say that, but that doesn't make it so.
OK, Einstein. You win. You've conclusively proven that there is indeed nothing limiting how fast a black hole can grow, and you can now collect your Nobel Prize in physics.
Except black matter is required to explain how stars move within our own galaxy. One would think all those black holes would be spotted effecting light from stars in our galaxy if the cause of the effect was visible. Black matter is a placeholder to make the gravity equations work properly and no one has figured out yet what fills in that placeholder, or (probably less likely) if the equations are just wrong.
"The movement of starts within our galaxy, as explained by Afro-american Matter. " - Drethon. 2015
My theory is that space expanded differently inside the black hole and that the difference influences our calculations, significantly reducing the needed ingested mass.
Yes, I will mention Slashdot when they give me the Nobel price for that.
Light cannot escape the black hole's event horizon. But as matter falls into the black hole, it's heated up tremendously and emits huge amounts of heat, light, and other electromagnetic radiation including X-rays. So it's the matter in the acretion disk being eaten up that emits so much energy.
Have you ever watched a waterfall?
Ever wonder how all the water doesn't just fall at once?
How about a traffic jam?
While the mechanics behind it are vastly more complex, the end result is quite similar for black holes. There's only so much matter that can transit across the event horizon (a finite surface area) in a given amount of time and if more matter is available it get's blocked up and the excess has to wait.
I'm in tears...
An AC on slashdot with an on-topic, reasonable and comprehensible explanation...
I think last I've seen that must have been around 1912 or so. Thank you! *sniff*
There are fewer illiterates than people who can't read.
The politically correct term is "African-American Matter."
Which reminds me of some ridiculous verbal gymnastics done by some US-based news reporters years back. They were interviewing a black African male as part of a diplomatic entourage from Africa. The knee jerk reaction to say "African American" was so deeply rooted in this news reporter's psyche that she couldn't bring herself to call him "black." Instead, she called him "An African-American from Africa," oblivious to how stupid that sounded.
Even better, I've seen reporters who simply can't deal with calling a white person emigrated from South Africa to the US as an "African-American" even though they are, indeed, "African-American."
The stupidity never ceases.
I wonder if the accretion disk could get to the point of pair instability thereby reducing the photon pressure and increasing the rate of flow across the event horizon. I did a little Googling, but any knowledgeable pointer would be appreciated - as I'm sure the idea is not novel.
A cosmologist's 'dark matter' (non-baryonic) is different than an astrophysicist's 'dark matter' (baryonic). To an astrophysicist, the term 'dark matter' has historically meant matter that is not lit up. It is not reflecting ar emitting light. Also it is not blocking light from some other source. There is nothing exotic or strange about it. It is just in the dark and so it cannot be seen.
There were many observations of matter within the milky way, and within other large spiral galaxies that showed the velocity and orbits of matter were not explained by the mass that could be seen. We only saw mass in the visible light for a long time. The matter had to be emitting light, reflecting light, or blocking another source of light for us to see it in telescopes.
It was simply assumed that Einstein's theories of gravity were still correct and there just had to be more matter than we were seeing. It wasn't seen becuase it was dark, hence the name 'dark matter'. Nothing wierd or strange, just stuff we didn't see.
As time went on our observations expanded into more regions of the electromagnetic spectrum. We saw that there, indeed, was a great deal more matter emitting in the infra-red, radio, x-ray, and gamma ray spectrums. This has added greatly to the amount of matter that is known. There is much less missing mass on the intragalactic scale than there once was because we see more of it.
However, it is not enough. Here is a really good explanation.
And there is a new problem. We are now mapping the interaction of galaxies, and of huge groups of galaxies. And there does not seem to be enough matter in sight to fully account for there movements. Enter the cosmologists.
The first 'exotic' form of 'dark matter' was probably the neutrino. While once considered a very exotic beast, it is now considered rather mundane (at least the three known flavors are considered mundane). The neutrino is an almost massless particle that is electrically neutral and has such a small cross section that it hardly ever interacts with other matter. Neutrinos have mass, so they do feel the effects of gravity and due the the equal and opposite reaction thing, they contribute to the gravity that we, our sun, and all the starts in the galaxy feel. While a single neutrino is almost non-existent, the huge numbers of neutrinos within the boundaries of the galaxy actually do add up to an appreciable mass.
Now cosmologists are suggesting even more exoctic unknown particles, like WIMPS, to explain the missing mass. Some people feel that we should be examining new theories of gravity. Maybe on a very large scale gravity behaves differently. We do know that our theories of gravity are not complete. We do not have a good field theory of gravity that works with quantum mechanics. Continued experimentation involving things like the Higg's Boson will help to confirm some of these leading edge theories, and get rid of others. By determining the mass and energy of the particles that communicate the 'mass' field we will be putting constraints from the real physical universe around these theories.
The cosmology stuff is the wierd exotic 'dark matter' that inspires wierd science fiction ideas, but it will probably be needed to explain all of the missing mass. When some of these, currently, exotic particles are observed measured and fit in an overarching theory, they will seem much more ordinary, as the three known neutrinos are today.
12-Billion-Dollar-Mass Black Hole Discovered
Flourescent (adj): smelling like ground wheat.
Personally, I think "dark matter" and "dark energy" don't really exist. Instead, I think there's something wrong with our understanding of the fundamental forces of the universe.
That is exactly what Dark Matter is and has always been claimed to be. It is a gap in our knowledge with certain characteristics. We know it is not baryonic matter, we know it is not an issue with gravity, as assume it is matter because matter has mass and mass distorts space(aka gravity). The biggest problem is that Dark Matter is the longest standing unknown in all of history. Through all of recorded history, problems have been solved shortly after the discovery of the problem. Dark Matter is nearly a century old and almost a magnitude worse than any other problem.
Plenty of great minds have looked at the problem. Our only hope is to keep running more tests and for technology to allow our tests to get better.
Forgot to add. "Dark energy" definitely exists, otherwise we'd be running into problems with the fundamental laws, like conservation of energy. Space itself is expanding and that takes energy, a lot of energy.
You've found me out! I admit it, I'm a member of a vast conspiracy that's foisting "static observation" on an unsuspecting public.
Also why we're able to see brown dwarves at all. It's a much lower scale gravitational collapse that will simply leave a frozen, dead Jupiter behind but there's sizable heat content in there (though perhaps augmented by deuterium + tritium fusion early on, and then radioactive decay like in Earth)
The equation is based on the complete lunacy that we know exactly how much matter is in the universe.
No equation in astronomy is based on knowing exactly how much matter is in the universe. Virtually every paper on such topics discuss error bars. A large amount of work on such topics deal with upper and lower bounds, explicitly dealing with the inability to know things exactly. There are a lot of realms of science where some value X is not known, but measurements show that X can't be larger than some bound, otherwise they would have caused different observations.
They also admit that there's a thing called the "observable" universe and we have no idea what is past it due to the speed of light vs spatial expansion.
Any universe that has a finite speed of light and finite age will have an observable distant limit, nothing to do with spatial expansion. This is really non sequitur to a discussion about things like galaxy rotation curves.
So they ignore planets and go for just stars since that's like 99% of the visible mass.
This is flat out wrong, as there have been multiple surveys for things like rogue planets, in addition to those looking low mass stars, various size black holes, and various forms of dust even. They didn't find exact numbers of such things, and no astronomer is making claims to have such numbers exactly, but they did set upper bounds on how much chunks of normal matter is floating around out there.
Then they say certain types of stars can't exist then they say oh crap, there's one of them.
You want to give an actual example? There are several rough limits placed on star properties, and it has made the news several times in the last decade when examples have been found close to limits, but not exceeding such limits. There are a lot of proposed ways to exceed some of those limits too, but have not been observed. But without concrete examples, it is hard to tell if you have a point or are just trying to pass off BS as insightful.
The entire basis for the equation is ridiculous,
Again with being vague; what is "the equation"? Do you mean the Einstein field equation and the rest of GR (not really just "the equation") which have extensive observation based testing independent of the dark matter issue?
You complain of people being too smug and sure of their ideas, yet seem to spout falsehoods and vague statements with more certainty than you would find in most publications on the actual topic.
Are you denser than a 12 billion solar mass black hole?
Actually, he is. Unlike regular black holes resulting from supernova collapse, a super-massive black hole is not very dense.
e.g. a one-billion solar-mass (2x10 to 39kg) hole would give a density of 200kg/m3 - less than that of cork!
http://physics.stackexchange.c...
Some have proposed that we may living inside an even bigger black hole.