3 ms·
They can't be created from stars 50-130 solar masses, but they can be still created by joining 2 black holes of smaller masses, right? The bet seems stupid whe
by ajuc 7y ago
They can't be created from stars 50-130 solar masses, but they can be still created by joining 2 black holes of smaller masses, right?
The bet seems stupid when you consider black hole in center of Milky Way is supposed to be 4 million times solar mass.
So the prediction was wrong.
- phkahler 7y agoThe collisions they're detecting are exactly the kind of events that can create something of the forbidden size. I think the claim is that those objects should not be near another black hole for a subsequent merger?
- Accujack 7y agoIf you read the article, you'd find out that the supermassive black holes like those at the center of our galaxy were formed very early in the Universe's life, when the laws of physics were different.
- Aardwolf 7y agoIt's the same laws but at higher energy level. Depends on how you look at it I guess? Would you say the laws of physics on the moon are different because you can jump higher?
- im3w1l 7y agoThis "when the laws of physics were different" really pisses me off. It makes it sound like gravity pushes you away and magic is real and stuff.
- coldtea 7y agoQM has even stranger effects, so there's that...
- ethbro 7y agoInaccurate, but a close enough approximation for values of "laws of physics" that equal "things we can experience in our universe." Mathematically? No. Practically? Yes.
- Sharlin 7y agoHowever, given that the whole point of the LIGO–Virgo experiment is to detect events where black holes merge and result in a single larger black hole, it is seriously weird that the article doesn't acknowledge that fact right away and then proceed to explain why the mass gap still exists.
- rsj_hn 7y agoFirst, this article talks about a mass gap, not a mass ceiling. E.g. stars between 50-130 solar masses shouldn't form black-holes, they should explode. The bet is about finding black holes in this gap. Second, the issue is LIGOs first 100 detections, not all detections. We know black holes in the mass gap could form by other means such as absorbing other black holes, it was assumed that this type of formation would be rare enough that it would not occur in the first 100 black holes detected by LIGO. So that was the bet, and the loss of the bet was the occasion to write the article. Unfortunately, while all this information is in the article, several misleading points are also in the article: * The headline of "a Black Hole So Big It ‘Should Not Exist'" is misleading * The diagram is equally misleading, not showing a gap but a ceiling * The mention of this only applying to the first 100 detections is buried at the end of the article, as is the fact that people are well aware that black holes can form via absorption and so enter the gap. The article makes it look like existing knowledge of black hole formation is being challenged, when what is basically a statistical bet about 100 observations has been settled. The combination of over simplification and sensationalization is a problem with mediocre science writing, of which this article is unfortunately an example.
- 01100011 7y agoCan't black holes also inhabit the gap by shrinking via Hawking radiation? Is that something we'd expect to occur given the current age of the universe or does it need longer timescales to occur? Also, do we know if there were special conditions during the initial phases of the post-big-bang early universe which might change the conditions under which black holes may form? For instance, non-stellar material condensing into a black hole?
- ajuc 7y agoHawking radiation shrinks the black holes the faster the smaller they are. For microscopic black holes they evaporate in fractions of second, but a black hole the mass of our sun would evaporate in 10^67 years which is significantly more than the age of universe. So I think the chance to detect a big black hole that evaporated significant percent of its mass is zero.