As if this primary season weren’t enough…
…the universe is full of black holes.
Probably. Maybe.
Supermassive black holes with masses of more than 10bn suns have previously been found at the heart of large galaxies located in dense clusters in the universe. But this is the first time astronomers have found such an object lurking at the centre of a large galaxy in a relatively empty area of the universe.
“We didn’t expect to see such a huge black hole in a small place,” said Professor Chung-Pei Ma, an author of the study from the University of California, Berkeley.
That, she added, opens up an intriguing possibility. With such galaxies more common than rich clusters, such supermassive black holes could be rife.
“What this is saying is that you don’t need these galaxy clusters to grow very massive black holes,” says Professor Poshak Gandhi of the University of Southampton, who was not involved in the study. “That throws a wrench in the works of our understanding of how these monster black holes form ”“ it throws the field wide open.”
I have to say I’m always assuming that the field is wide open.
So assuming you don’t need to have galaxy clusters for supermassive black holes, would you still need a galaxy for there to be a supermassive black hole? Could there be a bunch of supermassive black holes in the middle of voids like the Southern Local Supervoid or the Great Void?
A comment only partly about black holes. A couple of years ago I went to a lecture on black holes at the Explorers Club in NYC. The speaker was a physicist from ETH the Cal Tech of Switzerland. It was part of Swiss week in Manhattan. The talk was good and the gist was that black holes acted as sort of a cosmic thermostat. But at the reception there were a lot of Swiss. We spoke with a woman who had been a translator for international meetings in Geneva and New York. I asked her what her interest in black holes was. She said she could care less about black holes but she really wanted to see the inside of the Explorers Club!
Neo:
Been following astronomy since I was a kid (probably since your mom was just a gleam in her mom’s eye). The wonders discovered in that time have grown exponentially, each more mindboggling than the last. They’re still making monumental discoveries by looking at 20 year old plates. The James Webb telescope to be launched in 2018 will make the spectacular Hubble pics look like they were taken by a kid using a toy telescope, and ones already being constructed for launch in the 2020s will do the same to the James Webb.
“Not only is the universe stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine.”
– Sir Arthur Eddington
The biggest reason I’m sorry I’m old is that I won’t live to see the wonders that mankind will discover in the relatively near future, assuming we don’t extinct ourselves.
And the major reason I’m happy I’m old is that I won’t live to see this nation that I love being torn apart by the barbarians within and without.
geokstr:
My mom was just a gleam in her mom’s eye shortly before WWI.
neo-neocon Says:
“geokstr:
My mom was just a gleam in her mom’s eye shortly before WWI.”
See! That’s exactly what I said.
geokstr:
So, you’re well over 100 years old?
LOL
Well there you have it. Simply stated, this discovery represents additional proof that Anthropogenic Global Warming is not merely impacting the planet earth, but far reaching areas as well. It is creating recently discovered, horrific black holes in the universe in ways that baffle our scientists. So scary are these that it may even suggest that we are all going to get swallowed up.
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Fortunately, for Cosmologists, new and fantastical discoveries are allowing them the ability to attract attention on a regular basis. Otherwise, they’d be common wallflowers.
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I’ve enjoyed attending some interesting cocktail parties over the past few years. In doing so it has afforded me the opportunity to engage with Liberals in ways previously considered unimaginable. Once I realized that they would swallow any thesis drawing the conclusion that AGW is interconnected with every/any conceivable reality, it opened up endless possibilities.
“It’s a great life, if you don’t weaken…”
neo-neocon Says:
“geokstr:
So, you’re well over 100 years old?”
It certainly feels that way sometimes, as the original factory parts break or wear out, and after-market replacement parts are not yet readily available.
Yet it seems like just the day before yesterday that, not only were we not supposed to trust anybody over 30, we weren’t even sure people lived past 30.
Shades of Logan’s Run.
““It’s a great life, if you don’t weaken…”
My grandmother used to say that.