Monster Black Holes May Lurk All Around Us (yahoo.com)

Taco Cowboy quotes a report from Yahoo News: Astronomers have stumbled upon a supermassive black hole in an unexpected corner of the Universe, implying these galactic monsters are much more common than once thought, a study said Wednesday. The giant, with an estimated mass 17 billion times that of our Sun, was discovered in a relative desert, astronomers from the University of California, Berkeley, wrote in the journal Nature. "While finding a gigantic black hole in a massive galaxy in a crowded area of the Universe is to be expected -- like running across a skyscraper in Manhattan -- it seemed less likely they could be found in the Universe's small towns," said a university statement. Big, star-rich galaxies where supermassive black holes had previously been found, are very rare. Smaller ones like the NGC 1600 galaxy housing the newly-discovered whopper, are much more common, but were not previously thought to be appropriate host. "So the question now is: 'Is this the tip of an iceberg?'" said study co-author Chung-Pei Ma. "Maybe there are a lot more monster black holes out there that don't live in a skyscraper in Manhattan, but in a tall building somewhere in the Midwestern plains." The largest supermassive black hole spotted to date tipped the scales at about 21 billion solar masses, said the study authors.

Comments

Maybe this is the "missing mass"?

[Guy Smiley]

Maybe this is what they have been spending years trying to invent the invisible and undetectable dark matter for?

Re:Maybe this is the "missing mass"?

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe this is what they have been spending years trying to invent the invisible and undetectable dark matter for?

No, silly. Dark Matter is just cold elemental hydrogen, which vibrates at the same temperature as the alleged "cosmic background radiation" that was left over by the "big bang". Dark Energy is just the EM field, which astronomers completely ignore, even though a bar magnet will prove to you that electro magnatism is stronger than gravity.

Every comet we've been to has been a hard dry rock covered with fine dust, not a dirty snowball. Cometary tails are not water vapor, they are formed by the same process as the Aurora Borealis -- it's an electrical discharge event. The sun emits lone protons (H+ ions). This creates an electrical charge gradient in our solar system. Objects, like hard dry comets, which come sailing in from far out have a more neutral charge, but as they approach the sun the difference in relative charge allows electrical discharge to occur, and charged particles begin to glow. If you bombard silica (rock) with H+ ions some of the Oxygen from the SiO2 will break free. Some of those O's bind with H's and become HO (hydroxide), far less some become H2O. This is why we can see some H2O in the spectrogram of a comet's coma and tail, but can not find any vents nor water at the surface of them. The electrical discharge is why comets glow in UV light.

Once you realize that electricity plays a much greater role in the solar system, you'll soon infer that it may play a larger role in the universe. In fact, you'll find that when you account for EM field, you don't need nearly so much dark matter or dark energy to explain how galaxies hold themselves together, in fact some say you'll need none at all. With EM in the picture, filamentary galactic arms of spiral galaxies become simple to explain, just as are the filamentary structures of cometary tails, and of magnetic loops seen erupting from the Sun.

In fact, once you account for the EM field things like "pulsars" with irregular pulses make more sense: Perhaps you're seeing a simple cosmic scale capacitor / resistor discharge event, not a neutron star. And as for those black holes? Well, when you factor in the EM field they don't really need to be so large either. Indeed a galaxy's electromagnetic nexus can explain most of the behavior we're seeing with stars that have tight and fast orbits.

Next time you see an astronomer, ask them: If a small refrigerator magnet can overcome the gravity of our planet, then what of the immense magnetic fields generated by our sun? Ask them why they ignore EM field's contribution to the cosmic model. EM is stronger than gravity, then why do they think gravity is the dominant force? The answer will surprise you, I'm sure. The fact is: They foolishly consider the universe to be electrically neutral meanwhile claiming that a non neutral cosmic background EM field is permeating the universe... The cognitive dissonance is quite scary when you start to look into the issue deeper. It's like they don't want anyone to even consider things mentioned in this post.

Would you like to know more?

Nah!

[eyenot]

Some nice theories here but I'm sticking with my own pet theory: our observable universe exists entirely inside a black hole, slowly being compressed at the center across time.

Our measurements that don't take this into account see the universe as "expanding" because our cherry-picked points of reference are actually getting closer together.

But since this is all happening simultaneously, even our own instruments and myriad points of reference for myriad "constants" are also being compressed, which means it completely goes over our heads and the ruler we think we're holding is much shorter than it actually is.

Also, being on the inside of an event horizon explains why a universe that's supposed to be lit up with infinite stellar matter is more or less dark. Not the entire actual, "outside" universe is in here, inside this particular black hole, with us.

The smallest, relatively debris-like space rock outside this black hole might astound us with dimensions the size of the local group, and indeed the local group may have formed long after such a space rock was sucked in past this black hole's event horizon. As the matter from the space rock was siphoned into a stream of particles past the event horizon, and entered into proximity with the particles of other objects that had also been sucked in, their relative closeness exerted some weak influence of gravity and they coalesced into various tiny swirls and clouds.

Meanwhile, we cannot detect the singularity at the center of the black hole because of the relative proximity of all observable objects near to it. It would just appear to be a "background force" omnipresent over everything, and we would never be able to develop either an instrument to measure the singularity's exerted force because of a lack of possible reference-points.

This leads to the question "well, since black holes also capture light particles, why isn't all the light of the 'real', 'outside' universe also visible as a sheen all around us at the edges of the visible universe?"

But we don't have any concept of what happens to light after it crosses an event horizon. For all we know, photons are just energetic enough to whip around the event horizon without ever being perceived again (you'd have to be right on the event horizon, with a line of observation orthogonal to the photon's path -- which is always changing due to the centripetal force pointing inward) and only less energetic forms such as hydrogen actually manage to "fall in" (which would explain the otherwise inexplicable background hydrogen.)

Sorry if you haven't encountered this theory before, it's entirely my own creation that I came up with just trying to be controversial while lounging around staring at the sky at night. I'm not nearly mathematically creditable enough (only recently passed Differential Equations and completed my minor in mathematics, and majoring in computer engineering, not astrophysics or related fields,) I don't have the time or the fancy, and most importantly of all I wouldn't want to be the one to have to break it to anybody.

And I'm absolutely sure it would be rejected outright, just because every time I bring it up to anyone they just get stunned and stare off into space. I mainly use it as a psych-out for people who are high or drunk at parties, you know -- to fuck with people.