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More Supermassive Black Holes Than We Thought!
LeadSongDog writes: The Royal Astronomical Society reports five supermassive black holes (SMBHs) that were previously hidden by dust and gas have been uncovered. The discovery suggests there may be millions more supermassive black holes in the universe than were previously thought. George Lansbury, a postgraduate student in the Centre for Extragalactic Astronomy, at Durham University, said: “For a long time we have known about supermassive black holes that are not obscured by dust and gas, but we suspected that many more were hidden from our view. Thanks to NuSTAR for the first time we have been able to clearly see these hidden monsters that are predicted to be there, but have previously been elusive because of their ‘buried’ state. Although we have only detected five of these hidden supermassive black holes, when we extrapolate our results across the whole Universe then the predicted numbers are huge and in agreement with what we would expect to see.”
there's more?
And there it was, right in front of you, invisible the entire time..
So once these and others like them gobble up all the matter in the universe and then they start to work on each other, will we eventually end up with something akin to the makings of another Big Bang?
Astrophysicists?
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Could this be an explanation of the missing mass we currently attribute to dark matter?
I don't know much astronomy, but extrapolating from n=5 to the entire universe seems pretty silly. Perhaps these phenomenon are not uniformly distributed (I am assuming they made that assumption) and they happened to look at special areas.
>> So once these and others like them gobble up all the matter in the universe and then they start to work on each other, will we eventually end up with something akin to the makings of another Big Bang?
>> Could this be an explanation of the missing mass we currently attribute to dark matter?
No. No. They "found" these things right in the middle of galaxies, right where everyone else assumed there must be black holes (but couldn't observe directly).
>> Astrophysicists?
Or, you could just RTFA.
It's really great that the ESA is doing such great space science today. While NASA is off draining its resources on space cowboys and bloated contractor budgets the ESA is pioneering novel astronomy and leading the way, with no manned program at all.
If only the US would do programs like SMEX-11 (Small Explorer satellite program) like the ESA does instead of their "heavy" lift stuff we would know so much more about the universe.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
I thought you were talking about my country's national budget.
I cannot let a story about supermassive black holes go by without posting this:
https://youtu.be/pta-gf6JaHQ
I'm not someone you would normally think would be a big fan of this music, but a few years ago, I was looking for some music to play in the background when I was playing open world racing video games, like NFS: Most Wanted, etc. One of my students game me a CD/mp3 mix with a bunch of Muse, My Chemical Romance, Meshuggah, some Finnish Dark Metal bands, and some other groups. This led me to make a 2000-song racing playlist on Spotify that I still play in the background to this day when I play The Crew. I've added in some early Stooges, Ramones, GenX, etc, as well as a smattering of rockabilly, Wu Tang and punjabi rap. There's nothing like being in the last lap of a race and having "Survival" playing in the background. It's like some cross between Queen's "We Are the Champions" and Leni Riefenstahl.
OK, carry on.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Coincidence? I think not.
Sorry, I forgot there are ads on the Web; I use Lynx.
The summary title directly contradicts the summary text. They predicted ones that they hadn't seen yet. Then they found a way to see them, and it matched up with predictions. How is that "more than we thought" at all?
C'mon, editors...
The sky is blue.
There. Fixed it for your viewing pleasure. Enjoy!
COKE! The real thing
OMG, it's full of stars!
Table-ized A.I.
Seriously, it makes the phantom young earth arguments you guys trot out look like a comparatively closer estimate. Baffoons.
And if we're finding more supermassive tankers roaming the oceans, might the extra displacement be enough to account for the rise in sea level? That makes two of us explaining something without any clue about the sizes involved.
Dark matter is defined as not absorbing or emitting photons, which both black holes and dust clouds do. It isn't just mass or gravitational effects.
Even if black holes didn't absorb photons, there would need to be 20 such black holes for every 1 star to account for the discrepancy we call dark matter and dark energy.
Looking out pretty much anywhere in the sky, we don't see such gravitational effects to believe there are that many black holes in hiding.
Additionally, the five black holes observed are interacting gravitational with the very dust and particles obscuring them. This has already been taken into account in the 5% of the universes total mass-energy that interacts with other things.
We've known for some time that even a large portion of the non-dark matter and energy within that 5% is hidden from our view.
I suppose your magical sky daddy told you that, huh?
As far as I can tell, dark matter is just the modern equivalent of the cosmological constant - "I dunno, but if we fudge-factor in n it all works!"
Nope. Dark energy is that: we have a large-scale measurement we can't explain, but we have to call it something, and since it might not actually be constant, they didn't want to call it "cosmological constant".
Dark matter explains galactic rotation rates and lensing, and also predicted the CMBR data with some precision: the predictions of dark/familiar matter made from galactic rotation matched the observed ratio in the early universe measured by the CMBR probes.
Lots of black holes were among the MACHOs theories for dark matter, but the CMBR data confirmed the WIMPs theories had it right. We may not no much about these particles, but black holes, brown dwarfs, and so on are right out.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Isn't that some more mass that they keep trying to foist off on Dark Matter/Energy?
No! It's a *SIG*. Keep the Special Interest Groups away! (Con joke!)
So the headline says there's more than we thought, the summary says that there are as many as thought.
Ever thought of making the headline ACTUALLY USEFUL???
The missing mass looks to be distributed in a large spherical halo much larger than the galaxy itself. So I don't think it helps much. It also doesn't explain observations like the bullet cluster.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
From what I understand, we haven't ever "seen" any black holes, let alone super massive ones. What we do see is immense radiation emission coupled with mathematical mass projections that we theorize *may* be black holes. While this is the commonly excepted knowledge, it is far from absolute. There are plenty of related exotic things like dark matter, and mass projections that do not make sense... What we have is another tool apparently able to somehow pierce formerly obscured areas due to dust and gas. There are a lot of things we can't see, but can test for, and then there are things we can explain with mathematical models and theory, that is why it is call theoretical physics, and for the most part it is pretty difficult to prove one way or another. This is why we build multi-billion dollar massive colliders on earth to try and actually be able to measure and test some of these theories at least in an abstract way (underlying mechanics, to refine theories that have implications on other theories). Though I didn't RTFA of course, it is probably just the summary that is making such factual assertions, rather than something like "enhanced observation of characteristics such as radiation once obscured by dust and gas in which we currently theorize may be SMBH"...
Wow. read that post over again...he said the same thing 5 times over just in different contexts.