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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?
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.
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...
Uhmmmm.....if you read the article.....you'll find out that the UK astronomers that made the discover were using NASA's NuSTAR satellite observatory, which IS the SMEX-11 satellite.
Gordon
James Webb and Hubble wouldn't have happened without some pretty heavy lift.
If you can be a Space Cowboy, you can do a lot of other things, if you're focused on shoestring science, that's all you're going to get.
We need both, scrapping the Cowboys because you can get 10x as many shoestrings for the same price is missing the point. Politically, you won't get 10 shoestrings in exchange for shutting down a Cowboy project, you'll be lucky to get 2.
http://www.theinquirer.net/inq...
Love that tune. I first heard in the version of 2cellos with Naya Rivera ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?... ) but I admit the Muse original is better in the musical department :)
Therefore, by the (faulty) logic you're using, you're just a cow with a keyboard - osu-neko (2604)
Webb Hubble? Chelsea Clinton's father? :)
were using NASA's NuSTAR satellite observatory
I know. I also noticed that the story omitted mentioning this. That's not a problem, but I realized that if I attributed NuSTAR to ESA and criticized NASA it would be rewarded with mod points, because this is the preconceived, if blatantly ignorant view of too many people with mod points.
I'm a troll and I'm good at it. So sue me.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
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.
That escalated quickly.
Like the gravitational pull on an object attracted by a supermassive black hole.
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!)
They totally should have consulted you, despite your inability to spell buffoon. You realise they won't just stop at the extrapolation and take it for granted, don't you? No? Never mind.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
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"...