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

Greece, Venezuela, Argentina

[turkeydance]

there's more?

Re:Greece, Venezuela, Argentina

[bondsbw]

Your mom.

Ultimate Fate?

[sycodon]

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?

Re:Ultimate Fate?

[Charliemopps]

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?

No, Dark Energy more than compensates for any gravitational affects.
The current leading theory regarding the end of the universe is called: The Big Rip
I find the idea very unsatisfying though... not that the universe cares what I think.

Re:Ultimate Fate?

[lgw]

If you haven't read Penrose's book on his cyclic cosmology, you might enjoy it - it reconciles the Big Rip with the Big Crunch (there's no difference if there's no distance scale, and there's no distance scale if all particles are massless). Entertaining if not convincing.

Re:Ultimate Fate?

[jbolden]

They are too far away from each other mostly though when they rip each other apart they can throw off a lot of energy. Mostly though between years 5.8×10^(68) and 1.7×10^(106) black holes decay into nothing from Hawking radiation. The bigger they are the longer they last.

Hidden Blackholes

[Anonymous Coward]

Could this be an explanation of the missing mass we currently attribute to dark matter?

Re:Hidden Blackholes

[doublebackslash]

No and for two reasons.
This observation is in accordance with our models, so these aren't adding to the mass we had already inferred was there (but confirms that it is organized into massive black holes, so that is good to know)
Second, the amount of mass that is currently "dark" is about 5.4x what we can account for with all traditional forms of matter (atoms, neutrinos, light's mass-energy, etc). We know it is there based on its gravitational effects and have really good reasons to believe that it is a distinct physical phenomena (e.g. the Bullet Cluster's gravitational lensing agrees with dark matter's physical reality as opposed to a many of the proposed modifications to gravity)

Obviously dark matter is an active topic of research and so there are many areas of it that are fraught with misconceptions. Beware of simple answers which claim to be complete solutions.

I am not a researcher in this field, and this is obviously not anywhere near a complete explanation but I hope that at least clears up your question!

Re:Hidden Blackholes

[wile_e_wonka]

My recollection of what Neal DeGrasse Tyson said on one of his podcasts is that matter we cannot see wouldn't explain the "missing mass" because experiments indicate that "dark matter" does not interact with normal matter or photons, except in the form of gravity. I had thought for some time, "perhaps dark matter is just matter for which we have no evidence of its existence because we cannot see it." A hidden black hole would fit the bill there. But what was said on the show completely dispelled that notion. The problem here is that I am a non-scientist and don't quite recall what he said in the episode. Real scientists with knowledge of this--please weigh in!

As a footnote--Wikipedia says that a small portion of "dark matter" seems to be just regular matter we cannot see, but mostly it seems to not fit the characteristics of regular matter.

Follow-up question--could a huge number of supermassive black holes cause the effects we see from earth? My reasoning suggests the answer would be "no." The thought process being that, if scientists have been theorizing a larger number of supermassive black holes for some time and also wondering what this "dark matter" stuff is, more of those scientists would have said, "perhaps dark matter consists of those theorized black holes we haven't seen." I think this hasn't happened because scientists who actually know this stuff (not me) had already concluded that black holes don't fit the mugshot.

Exactly as many black holes as we thought!

[Sowelu]

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...

Re:ESA science

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:Small Sample Size

[St.Creed]

They looked at 9 galaxies and found 5 hidden SMBHs. I guess that's a pretty good case for extrapolation to higher numbers, assuming they picked random galaxies without visible SMBHs at the center and with a type that is not too different from other galaxies. I'm willing to assume they're not completely stupid :)

Re:Small Sample Size

[St.Creed]

From the article: “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.”

I think they expected to see them, and this extrapolates to, indeed, huge numbers. If they hadn't found any, it wouldn't have proven anything. If they'd find just one, extrapolation is difficult because it might be a lucky shot. But 2 or higher? I think that unless they had a specially selected sample set, it's safe to assume that would mean huge numbers.

Re:ESA science

[Tailhook]

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.

Re:Does this mean we don't need dark matter anymor

[lgw]

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.

Re:No one RTFA anymore

[allcoolnameswheretak]

That escalated quickly.

Like the gravitational pull on an object attracted by a supermassive black hole.