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UHZ1: NASA telescopes discover record-breaking black hole
- omnicognate 3y ago> 3.5 billion light-years from Earth > mass falls between 10 and 100 million suns The size of the sun already causes my brain to shut down. Everything about this is beyond contemplation.
- lgl 3y agoThe article states that even though it's roughly in the direction of a galaxy cluster that's 3.5 billion light years away, further observations by JWST found it to in fact be some staggering 13.2 billion light years away. From the article: > The extremely distant black hole is located in the galaxy UHZ1 in the direction of the galaxy cluster Abell 2744. The galaxy cluster is about 3.5 billion light-years from Earth. Webb data, however, reveal that UHZ1 is much farther away than Abell 2744. At some 13.2 billion light-years away, UHZ1 is seen when the universe was only 3% of its current age.
- omnicognate 3y agoHah, my mind is proportionally more blown then.
- ustamills 3y agoWow, if we're seeing it that far in the past I wonder if maybe it's large enough to have eaten the universe already and we just don't know it yet.
- pdonis 3y agoBlack holes don't "eat" surrounding objects. Their gravity is no different from the gravity of any other object of the same mass. This hole has a mass between 10 and 100 million solar masses; that's about the size of a dwarf galaxy. So its gravity would be no stronger than a similarly sized dwarf galaxy. We are in no danger of having the universe eaten by dwarf galaxies.
- hn8305823 3y agoIf the Sun were replaced by one solar mass black hole, we would freeze/starve to death but the Earth's orbit would be just as stable as it is now. In fact Earth might survive (as an ice planet) much longer than it would around the Sun since the Sun is expected to become a red giant and possibly swallow the Earth when it dies.
- dreamcompiler 3y agoIf the Moon were replaced by a black hole of its same mass, we wouldn't even notice except that the night sky would become moonless and we wouldn't have eclipses any more. The tides would keep happening as usual.
- z3phyr 3y agoIt will evaporate relatively immediately. So no tides.
- limbicsystem 3y agoIt will take longer than the age of the universe to evaporate. So tides. For a while.
- dotancohen 3y agoMoonlight is actually a very important influence in many natural cycles, all of which would be disrupted. And as a motivator for both our intellectual curiosity and our scientific curiosity, the lack of a detailed moon in our night sky would have retarded the development of human civilization.
- basementcat 3y ago"Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space." -Douglas Adams
- paulrouget 3y agoIf you consider the observable universe as the upper limit and the plank length as the lower limit, we're much closer to the observable universe (10^-35 meters -> 10^27). One could argue that Plank length is not the most best lower limit.
- fsckboy 3y agoPlanck the scientist? The Planck length is 10 to the −20 times the diameter of a proton. Why are we using something so small to talk about galactic distances?
- eagle2com 3y agoWe are using it as another point in the comparison between our everyday lives scale, and the extremes of our universe. It turns out, as beings living in the 10^0m scale, we are much closer to the size of the universe 10^27, than to the smallest possible distance, 10^-35. Which boggles my mind, I did not imagine the Planck length to be this small, if it even makes sense to use the word "imagine".
- Tommstein 3y agoWhat breaks my brain is that if the Sun were compressed into a black hole, its Schwarzschild radius would be less than 2 miles, but the biggest black hole we know about so far, Phoenix A, has a Schwarzschild radius of almost 2,000 AU. The radius of Neptune's orbit is "only" about 30 AU, so Phoenix A's Schwarzschild radius is almost 70 times longer. Illustration here: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d3/Phoenix_A_compared_to_Ton_618_and_the_Orbit_of_Neptune.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d3/Phoenix_... . And of course, volume increases cubically with radius. I have a hard time contemplating that you could make a black hole that ridiculously ginormous even if you crammed the entire universe into one black hole, and yet Phoenix A is far from the only supermassive black hole out there.
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- pdonis 3y ago> volume increases cubically with radius This intuition does not work in curved spacetime, particularly not for black holes. Black holes do not even have a well-defined volume at all.
- denton-scratch 3y agoWell, a sphere with some Schwarzschild radius has a volume. I was uncomfortable with the conflation of the "volume of a black hole" with the volume of that sphere.
- pdonis 3y ago> a sphere with some Schwarzschild radius ...is not what a black hole is. It is not even "something kinda sorta like a sphere with some Schwarzschild radius". It is nothing like any ordinary object you're used to. It doesn't have a well-defined "radius" any more than it has a well-defined volume; the Schwarzschild "radius" is actually sqrt(A / 4 pi), where A is the surface area of the hole's horizon (which in turn is calculated from the mass of the hole).
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- layer8 3y agoOnce you get used to log scale, things become much more manageable.
- contravariant 3y agoBe sure to switch back when someone asks you to guess their weight or age though. Most people don't appreciate it when you're off by one in logarithmic scale.
- layer8 3y agoThey may be flattered as long as you don’t tell them that it’s log scale. On another note, our senses generally work on a log scale (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weber–Fechner_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weber–Fechner_law), so it’s not something unnatural.
- _jal 3y ago> our senses generally work on a log scale, so it’s not something unnatural. Where confusion creeps back in is when sensory input is quantified. People don't perceive a 1000 lumen source as twice as bright as a 500 lumen source, but tend to think they should.
- conductr 3y agoSame, time is like that too. I’m not an sure if this video is entirely accurate but the scale of time and how infantile our current entire universe along with how it’s evolution is depicted can be difficult for me to comprehend https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=uD4izuDMUQA https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=uD4izuDMUQA
- dreamcompiler 3y agoThe Sun isn't even very big as stars go. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=M4M6wlBjU38&pp https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=M4M6wlBjU38&pp
- 1letterunixname 3y agoSwitch to log10 scale and Plank units then. ;]
- ahmedfromtunis 3y agoI wonder how big is (was?) that black hole? Is it the size of our sun?
- mperham 3y agoM87's black hole event horizon is larger than our entire solar system. 2B+ solar masses.
- IngoBlechschmid 3y agoI like this visualization of the staggering orders of magnitude: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QgNDao7m41M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QgNDao7m41M
- 1letterunixname 3y agoM87: 47 au Solar system: 30 UHZ1: 1
- _Microft 3y agoDoes UHZ1 mean something like "ultra-high Z, #1"? (Z as in redshift)
- ziddoap 3y agoI tried looking a bit, and couldn't figure it out either. I thought the redshift value was typically given in the designation of these ultra-distant objects (e.g. GN-z11, GLASS-z12, GL-z13, JADES-GS-z13-0, at redshifts of ~11, ~12, ~13 respectively) but I guess that must not really be a "rule".
- raattgift 3y agoI think "U" is probably for UNCOVER where that is "Ultradeep Nirspec and nirCam ObserVations before the Epoch of Reionization". https://www.astro.princeton.edu/~goulding/research_uncover.html https://www.astro.princeton.edu/~goulding/research_uncover.h... may have some naming-scheme details I missed glancing through the two papers linked there (and the earlier JWST UNCOVER Treasury Survey <https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.04026 https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.04026>), or someone might eventually be brave and ask him or one of his collaborators directly. :-) I think z ~ 10 is technically an ultra-high redshift galaxy. Table 2 in the "Treasury Survey" above predicts observations of tens of galaxies z > 12, when the universe at large is much more likely to be entirely electrically neutral (~ 10 is in the epoch of reionization, more or less). But please come back with "heroic" spectra from z ~ 15-30 (thinking of the linked article at the top with respect to direct-collapse black holes, Pop III, Lyman-Werner radiation, etc etc), or hey GW spectra from z > 10^10 - 10^30 (beyond scope of topic).
- _Microft 3y agoThe preprint can be found at https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.15458 https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.15458
- gorgoiler 3y agoThe video on this page does a very good job of answering the question a lot of you might be asking right now: what happens when you accidentally tread on one of these things: https://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/72254-schwarzschild-black-hole-simulation https://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/72254-s... Blue is free falling into the hole. Yellow is observing and sees Blue’s clock come to a halt on the horizon. Beyond that much I can’t really explain but I found the link on this page: https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/689129/when-an-object-crosses-a-black-hole-event-horizon-does-the-entire-object-cross https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/689129/when-an-o...
- 303uru 3y agoHighly recommend grabbing a copy of Carlo Rovelli's new book White Holes, he does a great job of explaining black holes and then delves into white holes.
- digging 3y agoQuick summary: We've spotted strong evidence for a supermassive black hole (of the kind that tend to sit in the center of galaxies like ours, which contains Sagittarius A*) in an extremely distant galaxy - one that formed within the first half-billion or so years of the galaxy. What makes this important is that we've seen increasing evidence that supermassive black holes (SMBHs) exist earlier than we've expect if they were born from the deaths of massive stars and slowly accumulating mass in the way "typical" black holes today do. This black hole is apparently very good evidence that these early SMBHs did not form from star collapse but may have formed from gas clouds collapsing directly into black holes. Finding support for this alternative model could lead us to new possibilities in physics.
- hn8305823 3y ago> formed within the first half-billion or so years of the galaxy. Universe?
- Sai_ 3y agoThese black holes sit in the middle of the galaxy so it’s likely they were created early in the life of the galaxy. Galaxies were still being created much after the Big Bang and the universe coming into existence.
- digging 3y agoNo, I meant universe. I believe the current models expect that galaxies formed around these SMBHs, not the other way around. After all, if they're collapsing directly from clouds of extremely hot gas, and they have the mass of thousands or millions of stars, it's hard to imagine there were already thousands or millions of stars in the local area not sweeping up or disturbing all that gas.
- dplavery92 3y agoCorrect, the article places UHZ1 at 13.2 billion light-years away, so roughly ~500 Gy into our 13.7-billion-year-old universe.
- wolverine876 3y agoA question about such distant observations: How can our direct observation of something 13.2 billion light years away not be blocked by intermediate objects? Seemingly adding to the problem is that small closer objects can occlude much larger distant ones; just go outside and shade your eyes, for example, or block your view of an entire galaxy with a small pebble. Is the universe so empty that it's not a problem? Are we just lucky that this object happens to be directly observable? What proportion of the sky is directly observable at 13.2 billion light years?
- p1mrx 3y agoThis photo provides an overview of how much something vs. nothing is out there: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Webb%27s_First_Deep_Field_(adjusted).jpg https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Webb%27s_First_Deep_... Even without a telescope, you can infer that space is mostly empty because the sky is dark at night: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olbers%27s_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olbers%27s_paradox
- xwdv 3y agoThis is only true because the speed of light is fairly low relative to the size of the universe. If it was infinite, we’d be bathed in light.
- pixl97 3y agoEh only if it were both infinite in size and age. Because it is expanding light is redshifted to radio signals.
- lucisferre 3y agoAn interesting thought, I would expect that redshift would not be a thing if the speed of light was infinite. A lot of other problems too though.
- ziddoap 3y ago
- cmurf 3y agoWhat if the universe is anisotopic? Could the expansion of high density energy during the big bang had some non-uniformity resulting in "chunks" that eventually become matter resulting in possibly more rapid creation of this variety of SMBH? Or maybe such non-uniformity doesn't require anisotropy?
- raattgift 3y ago> What if the universe is anisotropic? It is. Look up. Look down. The rock below and the sky above aren't homogeneous either (birds, clouds, trees; soil, roots, different size granules of sand and pebbles, clays, etc). But that's locally rather than at cosmologically-large scales. Cosmic-scale isotropy and homgeneity give us a set of freefalling-in-deep-intergalaxy-cluster-space "Eulerian" observers who see, at the largest scales, a dust of galaxies surrounding them; we can build a set of coordinates that travel with these observers. These comoving coordinates are useful in cosmology, and are arguably "picked out" by the distribution of matter. From them we get the scale factor, a notion of cosmological time that applies throughout the entire universe. In principle any observer could determine a mapping between its preferred local system of coordinates and the comoving coordinates. In practice, we can determine the chemistry of distant objects via (red-shifted) spectral lines. If the universe were anisotropic at the largest scales, but still homogeneous at the largest scales, we can consider a simple (dipole) case to start with: there is unignorably more matter and cosmic radiation in one half of the sky than in the other half, but each half has spiral galaxies galore. We would need a different system of cosmological coordinates, because observers to the left and right are effectively accelerated with respect to each other (and us, in the middle). The shape of the observable universe would differ; rather than the cosmic horizon(s) we have now that depend on the expansion history, we would have a set of Rindler-like wedges defining the boundaries of cause and effect that depend on both the expansion history and the relative anisotropy. Fascinatingly, the acceleration between the left and right gives an observer a very different evolution of particle numbers in each direction (if I remember late-noughties Einsteinian takes on Rastall's 1972 theory of gravitation, which I am not sure I do, the sparser half will fill with a surprisingly warm thermal bath, so the conservation of energy is broken much much harder in such a universe than in ours, which only has energy "disappear" as light and the like experience redshift with the expansion). We could of course complicate this into a multipole anisotropy, and get things that look even less like what we see. Because of that we "wash out" the local anisotropies (we ignore Andromeda and what we see of the Milky Way as "not cosmologically far enough") and find that the resulting isotropy and homogenity is a very good fit for the cosmic microwave background and ultra-deep-field astronomy. That will continue to be tested with gravitational wave astronomy. Anisotropic and inhomogeneous cosmologies include those with supervoids and/or strangely-shaped masses (spirals and ellipticals here and there, but in other places or at supergalactic scales weirder structures dominate). One finds such cosmologies used in explorations of structure formation. These cosmologies can look much like ours, in terms of present-day observables. They're certainly more interesting for physicists when they are a very close match to our standard (homogeneous, isotropic) cosmology, but different enough to admit a different coupling between the expansion history and dark matter (the standard one dilutes dark matter in a predictable way at the largest scales, and similarly to the dilution of cold ordinary matter). Daniel Pomarède <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Pomar%C3%A8de https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Pomar%C3%A8de> is a huge figure in that area of research, and the wiki bio is a good starting point if you have a deeper interest in your first question. Temperature winds up being very important, in part because of an acceleration between observers deep in a supervoid and observers in the non-void web-like or net-like structure, so we have to figure out why the cosmic microwave background doesn't seem to have large cold spots, and why the reticulated structure doesn't glow much warmer. This 2022 Starts With A Bang article by Ethan Siegal is relevant and may be of interest. <https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/cmb-cold-spot/ https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/cmb-cold-spot/> Finally, your second and third questions are somewhere between "it's not necessary and doesn't really help" and "well if you adapt cosmology to favour a particular channel of early black hole formation you now need a mechanism to restore the small scale temperature fluctuations of the cosmic microwave background".
- throw1234651234 3y agoAll these reports are so abstract to me since we can't even take a picture of the planets around Alpha/Proxima Centauri 4ly away, nor would we really be able to pick up their radio signals unless we knew EXACTLY what to listen for.
- notamy 3y agoRelated Ars Technica article https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/11/half-of-the-mass-of-an-early-galaxy-is-in-its-central-black-hole/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/11/half-of-the-mass-of-...
- twic 3y ago> This heavily obscured quasar with a bolometric luminosity of ~5 × 10^45 erg s−1 Aka ~5 × 10^38 W. Why do astronomers use ergs?
- oh_sigh 3y agoPartly because it was the standard when huge advances were being made in astrophysics in the late 19th/early 20th C. Partly, because some formulae are more convenient to use in cgs than in SI, because cgs is not rationalized and SI is.