The Mystery of the Naked Black Hole (sciencemag.org)

sciencehabit writes: Most, if not all, galaxies have supermassive black holes at their centers surrounded by dense clouds of stars. Now, researchers have found one that seems to have lost almost its entire entourage. The team, which reported its find at the annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society, says it doesn't know what stripped the stars away. But it has put forward a tantalizing possibility: The object could be an extremely rare medium-sized black hole, which theorists have predicted but observers have never seen.

Comments

FTFY

[bondsbw]

The object could be a black hole, which theorists have predicted but observers have never seen.

Re:FTFY

[Anonymous Coward]

Well they went IN and found endless bookcases

So there is a possibility that the phenomenon we know of as black holes are actually IKEA

Isn't it obvious?

[__aaclcg7560]

The black hole lost its entire entourage because it ran out of money. All that white dust for non-stop parties don't come cheap.

Wow ...

[gstoddart]

Man, that title sounds like a cross between a Nancy Drew book and some really bad porn.

Re:Not an astronomer, obviously

[AthanasiusKircher]

How do we know the black hole itself didn't strip the stars away? That's kinda what they do, isn't it?

Not really, or at least not anymore than stripping the planets in the solar system away is "kinda what" the sun does. Contrary to the popular image, black holes aren't like giant vacuum cleaners that suck stuff in. Most of them tend to have lots of things in stable orbits around them, as stars have planets, and planets have moons. The only stuff that tends to fall in is stuff that gets directed towards them. A giant black hole at the center of a galaxy would only tend to consume stars which were "thrown" toward it, usually by unstable orbital dynamics created by encounters with other stars.

confusing title

[ooloorie]

A "naked singularity" is usually what people call a black hole without an event horizon, an object that's pretty important in theoretical physics. Calling something a "naked black hole" is kind of confusing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Re:confusing title

[Rei]

You totally missed the person's point. It's not about using the word "black hole" when they should have used the term "singularity" (note: black hole and singularity are not synonyms). It's that a "naked singularity" is a very specific term, and it doesn't mean "a black hole not surrounded by stars" - it means a black hole without an event horizon. This is an important concept in physics because there's a number of situations that seem like they should be able to produce one (such as strongly rotating black holes), but if you had one, relativity would break down near it. The event horizon in a black hole "protects" our universe from the effects of any weirdness inside the hole (such as a singularity, if they actually do exist), but with a naked singularity you have no such "protection". The concept exposes an area of weakness in our current understanding of physics.

Calling a black hole without stars a "naked black hole" would be like calling a jacket made out of a very transparent plastic an "invisibility cloak". It's using words that can be seen to make sense (you can't see it, so it's an invisibility cloak!), but it gives readers the totally wrong impression of what is being discussed.

Re: confusing title

[gstoddart]

No, a good editor isn't going to put such rubbish into a headline.

This was the headline in both TFS, and TFA.

If every headline (by which we mean the brief title at the beginning of a story (by which we mean an article or essay)) is going to provide the reader (by which we mean the intended audience), with a fully expanded (by which we mean explain in more detail) version of every word used in the headline (see above) to convey more information (by which we mean clarify) ... then not a single article would ever get finished.

You could put that in a paragraph, but if people started putting that shit into headlines it would be stupid and useless.

Re:confusing title

[gstoddart]

You totally missed the person's point.

No, I didn't miss it, it's a stupid point.

It's that a "naked singularity" is a very specific term

Which would have no meaning to the intended audience.

This is an important concept in physics

And is, again, too fine of a distinction for the target audience to shove into the headline.

It's using words that can be seen to make sense (you can't see it, so it's an invisibility cloak!), but it gives readers the totally wrong impression of what is being discussed.

As opposed to, what, writing a headline which nobody will want to read the article??

If you publish an academic article on the topic, by all means use as much scientific specificity as you require for a full educated audience who understands the nuances of this. If you publish an internet news story intended for laypeople to read and go "wow, that's kind of cool", you sure as hell don't start throwing around terms which have such highly specific meaning.

The people who know these distinctions aren't the ones reading these articles. The ones who don't know these distinctions don't want a bunch of confusing shit thrown at them which makes them think "I don't want to read this crap because I have no idea what the fuck it means, if I wanted to read a science paper on a naked singularity I'd have majored in fucking physics".

Just who the hell do you think this article was written for? It sure as hell wasn't Stephen Hawking.

Do you ever in your life need to communicate with people with less than complete knowledge on a specific topic? If you do, do you go straight to being an asshole and talking in highly specific nuanced technical language and piss them off?

I'm assuming the link to arxiv.org is incorrect, but a headline like "The Origin of Double-Peaked Narrow Lines in Active Galactic Nuclei I: Very Large Array Detections of Dual AGNs and AGN Outflows" would NEVER make a curious layperson read the damned article ... and you can rest assured, the article on sciencemag.org is NOT targeting the people who understand this highly specific and nuanced disctinction.

Pedantry has its time and place. Appealing to merely curious laypeople isn't one of them.

Re:confusing title

[Rei]

I'm of the view (that Hawking recently has started promoting) that there's no such thing as either a singularity nor an event horizon, that a black hole is basically just an area of near-frozen time formed during the collapse of the star (everything that falls in basically "freezing" into it relative to an outside observer), and that time basically leaks out as the black hole boils off (and its mass reduces). Aka the collapse is still ongoing and everything is still falling in from our perspective, just incredibly slowly. There's nothing behind some inescapable "wall", certainly no firewall - objects are still emitting photons that will ultimately escape, only after incredible spans of time and so distorted by then as to be unrecognizeable.

Re:confusing title

[painandgreed]

I always suspected that the concept of a singularity was a psychological crutch that made the mathematics easier to visualize for us mere mortals; anything on the other side of an event horizon is undefined, and anything real becoming undefined is psychologically difficult.

It probably gets much more complicated that that. Stars collapse and you've got a neutron star. Eventually, the pressure at the center of the neutron star will equal the energy needed to break down the neutrons into a quark-gluon plasma. Now you've got a question of the transparency of neutron star matter to quark-gluon plasma as the gravitational forces at the center will be zero while the space once occupied by the destroyed neutron is filled and the new neutron in the center is destroyed. I bet somebody a lot smarter and with a lot more info than us has said "Hrrm, that's an interesting situation" many decades ago and has done some math and that we are here using the assumption of a singularity at the middle indicates that the math, and all further studies as we get more info, indicate that the neutrons break down faster than the plasma can escape, preventing any sort of steady state and they are left with a quark-gluon plasma so dense that it can't help to continue to compress. With no reasonably known method for keeping everything from compressing to a singularity, that is the assumption.

Clickbait headline

[ian_billyboy_morris]

I read the headline, and got very excited thinking that someone had found a naked singularity, it should have been re-worded to say, The Mystery of the Black Hole with Middle aged spread or something. Finding a intermediate sized Black hole is interesting, but not quite as exciting as a naked singularity would have been. To be fair to /. Sciencemag came up with the title, not the editors!