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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.
Was found in an empty space... duh!
it seemed less likely they could be found in the Universe's small towns," said a university statement
Well that's great and all, but it misses the most important point of this entire story - what kind of shirt was the spokesman wearing when he released the statement? We already know, from empirical experience, that this fashion statement overshadows anything that might have been said or any legitimate human achievement that may have occurred. Up to and including announcing that HUMANITY LANDED A SPACE PROBE ON A GODDAMNED COMET.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Maybe the black hole they found used to be in the center of a super massive galaxy, but had already swallowed up most of the galaxy so there's not much left, leaving the impression that its a super massive black hole in the center of a not-so-massive galaxy?
Maybe this is what they have been spending years trying to invent the invisible and undetectable dark matter for?
Monster Black Holes May Lurk All Around Us
I thought I only had to watch out for their over-priced HDMI cables.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
No dark matter is the souls of the departed, undetectable except by their mass.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Some of the evidence for dark matter is that parts of galaxies revolve at a different rate than would be expected if all the matter were of they type we understand. This black hole is much bigger than the black holes in some known galaxies. The rotational speed of those galaxies can't be explained by a super massive black hole in a different galaxy. One of the mysterious effects is the difference in rotational speed as you go out from the center of the galaxy. Again that can't be impacted by something that's only in the center. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... From that same article you'll see other evidence based on gravitational lensing that again can't be explained away by even a large number of super massive black holes.
Black matter matters?
I can verify. There is a giant one in my wallet. I put money in... aaaaaand it's gone.
There is 0 evidence that what we call a "black hole" is an actual real class of objects that really exist.
Black holes is a prediction of our theory which matches observations so far. A recent example is the black hole merger causing the gravitational waves detected at LIGO.
Unless we find a different theory which matches observations better and which says that black holes are in fact not black holes but something else, we will think of these objects as black holes.
Theory suggests that black holes cannot form because they would require infinite time to collapse.
This is plain wrong. The collapse happens in a very short time, in the proper frame of reference.
See for example http://physics.stackexchange.c... for more details.
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.
"Stratigraphically the origin of agriculture and thermonuclear destruction will appear essentially simultaneous" -- Lee
All these hysterical headlines.
So, I invoke a variation of the Fermi Paradox in relation to black holes. If they were all over the place "lurking" as the article suggests we should see evidence of that through Gravitational Lensing. Random points in space where suddenly we see a 'smear.' Other evidence would be through objects moving in odd was as we see at the center of our own galaxy. I've never read about any of that.
Last time I checked, we only see lensing where there is a defined galaxy, which then explains the lensing effect. And there we have it.
I realize things move fast in cosmology so perhaps my information is dated already. I always welcome a chance to learn something new.
We don't know for certain that what we are calling Matter is matter at all. Matter is a term used to explain our observations and our models.
[eyeroll] What we refer to as matter is matter by definition based on phenomena we have directly observed and experiments we have conducted on its properties. We understand quite a lot (though not everything) about its properties and component parts. Dark matter is something we have no direct observations of and have no idea what its properties might be aside from its apparent effect on gravitational models at large physical scales. We know matter is matter because we've seen it directly, have experimental evidence of its properties and assigned it a name. We have no idea if dark matter is actually matter because we haven't seen it directly and have no direct experimental evidence of its properties, though we have assigned it a tentative name. The most we've managed to do with dark matter is to constrain its possible properties somewhat but much more work remains to be done. It makes sense to tentatively call it matter as long as we acknowledge that such a label may turn out to be ultimately incorrect.
To put it plainly I'm not arguing that we don't know anything. I'm pointing out that our actual understanding of what we are calling "dark matter" is rather limited at this time. Not the first time that has happened in our scientific history and it won't be the last.
It also could be some sort of error in our model of how energy works.
Matter and energy are the same thing. E=MC^2 and all that. That is well understood. Saying you have an error in your model of energy is really the same as saying you have an error in your model of matter.