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.”

Comments

Glaciers melting in the dead of night

[PopeRatzo]

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.