14 ms·

A single, 'naked' black hole confounds theories of the young cosmos

196 points by pykello 1y ago

cluckindan 1y ago
”By reconstructing the vortex, the team directly measured the mass of the object it was orbiting: 50 million times more massive than our sun.” Is that not an indirect measurement?
- dotancohen 1y ago
  It is the most direct measurement that astronomers have. That said, I do agree that the word "directly" should not have been in that sentence.
- actionfromafar 1y ago
  Even scales measure indirectly.
reactordev 1y ago
If the theory of abnormal galaxy formation hold up, then the Big Bang was spitting out both simultaneously. Maybe there’s a mathematical “tipping point” for mass where the weight of it crushes the atoms? Resulting in early black holes from abnormal matter… not from a collapse but just from mass being in close proximity. There still so much to learn…
- gus_massa 1y ago
  > “tipping point” for mass where the weight of it crushes the atoms? If you have a material of constant density like water, bananas or rocks, then if you have a ball that is big enough you get a neutron star where all the atoms collapsed in a huge-mega-super-nuclei. (I think the surface may have some normal atoms, and the center may be even more strange.) If the ball is even more big enough you get a black hole. If you use a gas like Hydrogen that has no constant density, the calculation is similar, but more complex. IANAA, but I expect that the collapse into the black hole does not capture the 100% of the initial mass if the object is a rotating irregular blob, so in this huge cases near the big bang I expect the leftover to form something that looks like a galaxy. And the lack of leftover is what is surprising. (Again, IANAA.) Except in neutron stars and black holes, atoms are very stable. There are many conservation laws, like the number of leptons (like the electron) and barions (like the proton/neutron) that make it hard to create weird stuff. You can create weird stuff for a very short time, but almost immediately it goes back to normal stuff. As always, there may be some surprise in particle physics, but I don't remember or expect something like this.
  - IAmBroom 1y ago
    > Except in neutron stars and black holes, atoms are very stable. Radioactive elements excepted, of course. And when they get struck by ionizing photons. So I would rather say: non-radioactive atomic nuclei are stable.
    - Workaccount2 1y ago
      Radioactive atoms are just unstable atoms shedding energy to until they fall into a stable atom state. It's not really atoms falling apart into non-atoms.
      - JumpCrisscross 1y ago
        To be fair, everything is stable if we restrict ourselves to their stable subsets.
        IAmBroom 1y ago
        Exactly. It's like saying baked goods are shelf-stable because they degrade into humus, which is shelf-stable.
  - reactordev 1y ago
    Not to quote a 90s New Zealand pop hit but… how bizarre!
Towaway69 1y ago
Am I the only one to see HALs eye here. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HAL_9000 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HAL_9000 Coincidence? I don't think so. /s
imperio59 1y ago
[flagged]
- danparsonson 1y ago
  "Scientists having to face the fact that their theories aren't perfect" - I think you fundamentally misunderstand how science works, or else you hang out with some extremely arrogant astronomers. Why do you think they put the JWST up there, if not to get better data and thereby improve our understanding of the universe? If we thought our theories were already perfect, what would be the point in doing more research?
  - PantaloonFlames 1y ago
    > Why do you think they put the JWST up there, if not to get better data and thereby improve our understanding of the universe? Think about how much effort scientists had to make, to bring JWST into existence. The funding proposals, the design, the engineering to get it launched. Generations of effort, entire careers dedicated just to making it happen. All of that effort sings one song: we don’t know, and we want to learn.
- mapt 1y ago
  You are regurgitating almost pure grievance against people who just want to study the universe. Every researcher in every field all the time wants more data, better studies, more evidence. That is basically what science is. This attitude about "those damn smug scientists who think they know everything" emerges from authoritarian nationalists selling resentment politics, and it has led to widespread violence against scientists in the past. Its prevalence in Germany is one part of why the US got the bomb first, and its prevalence in the Soviet and Chinese systems is part of why were not able to keep up with us economically (until recently). This political project actively intends to defend enterprises like JWST (sometimes even after building and launching the damn thing!), and current budgets have dozens of existing projects being shut down for good.
  - analog31 1y ago
aleatorianator 1y ago
[flagged]
api 1y ago
Primordial black holes seem likely since many models predict them. They’re not a fringe idea. They are also a dark matter candidate, though this is more controversial. The ones we are seeing here would be huge ones but their masses could range the spectrum. Smaller ones would have evaporated already but there could be tons of asteroid, moon, and planetary mass ones around. At least some dark matter may be black holes the size of a hydrogen atom with the mass of an asteroid, and similar objects. These would be incredibly hard to detect. The only way would be their gravitational effects on other bodies or weak anomalous radiation bursts when they rarely encounter matter. They’re also awesome and weird. One could, for example, shoot right through the Earth. If it was small nothing might happen. Larger ones might cause seismic events or perhaps Tunguska type events due to induced fusion in the atmosphere. What was Tunguska anyway? The most exciting thing is that if small mass PBHs exist and are common enough, we could find one someday in our solar system, maybe captured as a moon or in an asteroid belt. That would be close enough to send a probe to go look at it and do experiments with it. Being able to directly examine a black hole could be the thing that lets us “finish” physics. It would let us see conditions far beyond anything any imaginable terrestrial accelerator could ever produce.
- WaxProlix 1y ago
  I encountered a theory that 'planet x' might be such a PBH, explaining its ability to gravitationally impact post Neptunian bodies and its elusiveness. Would be incredibly cool to have something so exotic (or commonplace?) so close to home. Cool idea on Tunguska - would such an explanation make predictions that we could verify? Radioactivity or changes to carbon in stones or the rings of local trees... An interesting thought.
  - api 1y ago
    If planet X exists and is a planetary mass PBH it could unlock the universe in many ways. We could use it as a gravitational slingshot to fire probes at significant fractions of the speed of light out for flyby surveys of other solar systems.
    - 1y ago
a3w 1y ago
I thought a naked singularity was a white hole, one without an event horizon. And physicists hate that idea, but expect to never find one anyway.
- tsimionescu 1y ago
  A white hole is a completely different object, the opposite of a black hole, not a baked singularity. A white hole is an area of spacetime that no mass/energy (even light) can ever reach - versus a black hole which no mass/energy can escape. However, my understanding of what a naked singularity means is still in conflict with the article. I understood a naked singularity to be a black hole that is larger than its event horizon, such that it's possible to reach the singularity and then come back from it.
  - JumpCrisscross 1y ago
    > A white hole is an area of spacetime that no mass/energy (even light) can ever reach Would the Big Bang be a white hole?
    - andrewflnr 1y ago
      IIRC the math is in fact very similar if not identical between a white hole and the Big Bang. But I don't actually know the math, so...
      - rvba 1y ago
        No one ever shows the math anywhere. They just write that it is hard, or that it doesnt work. It became basically some sort of a pseudo religion. On a side note Lard Hadron Collider is safe from micro black holes due to Hawking radiation. Issue is, that there does not seem to be any proof for Hawking radiation. It's just a model. Probably correct, but perhaps not. So the argument about LHC safety is flawed from the start and apparently anyone who points this out is "anti science". Sadly as I wrote science in some parts is a bizarre parody of itself, more like some cult. You cannot point out logical flaws anymore. Expecting mass downvotes for this post, with no rebuttal. Because scientists are never wrong. What about (yes - what-aboutism) the reproductivity problem...
graycat 1y ago
Have the black hole primal and then "naked" due to the early, rapid expansion?
- zero_bias 1y ago
  When primordial black holes formed, there was no matter that could clump around them, as the matter at that time had a very high temperature
w10-1 1y ago
Naive outsider here... The "single naked" titling is a bit misleading, since there are hundreds of these challenging current theory. But how often are those we do see are replicated in the so-call smear of lensing? Does this instance (QSO1) presenting 3 times create more analysis opportunities? E.g., the 7.3-hour observation that produced higher-resolution data that checked out as a vortex of hydrogen: would we expect to see the same features in all three images (modulo lensing transforms)? Reading that preprint (at [1]), it seemed they only used 1 of 3 (image A). [1] preprint: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.21748 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.21748
gigatexal 1y ago
as a connoisseur of all the outlets (YouTube and other publications) that make really tough astrophysics easy for the layman I just love this. I've seen everything I could understand on YouTube about blackholes. I just find them so fascinating. And this is really, really cool.
dreamcompiler 1y ago
I didn't see any mention of angular momentum. If a gas cloud has essentially no angular momentum relative to its center of mass, it will collapse directly into a BH, no? If angular momentum exists, you get a galaxy.
- andrewflnr 1y ago
  > The scientists found that bright material — likely hot gas — swirled around in a furious vortex, one that backed up Furtak’s preliminary findings. Which is probably science-journalist for "has an accretion disk". That enough angular momentum for you?
- pantulis 1y ago
  There are a bazillion ways to rotate but only one way to not rotate. I'd say that the probability of a gas cloud without angular momentum is as low as to be indistinguishable from zero.
- 1270018080 1y ago
  It's effectively impossible to have no angular momentum with these processes.
- perihelions 1y ago
  It's all spinning around the BH, and spins faster the closer to the BH it is. It was actually the core point of this particular experiment to measure how fast it's spinning; the paper's title is "A direct black hole mass measurement...", and the way they're doing that is "dynamical BH mass measurement"—i.e. measuring how fast gas spins around it, and applying kinematic laws.
epistasis 1y ago
> “The most plausible explanation seems to be [that] the black hole developed before the galaxy,” said Marta Volonteri (opens a new tab), a theorist at the Paris Institute of Astrophysics who helped with the new analysis of QSO1. For those that like science communication in video form, Becky Smethurst's YouTube channel has a ton of great info on super massive blackholes, and cosmology in general, from a practitioner in the field. Here's one from a month ago about the evidence (then) for whether super massive black holes or galaxies came first: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B9yDWbilIG4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B9yDWbilIG4 The science appears to be moving very quickly with all the new info from JWST.
robofanatic 1y ago
So does that mean these naked blackholes are weaker than those surrounding them, hence unable to pull anything towards them?
- epistasis 1y ago
  Not at all, this is the size of a supermassive black hole, 50 million times the mass of the sun, like the one at the center of every galaxy. Sagittarius A*, the super massive black hole at the center of the Milky Way, only has a mass of 4 million suns. They have always been a mystery, because it's not entirely known how these supermassive black holes could have formed, since the known methods of star collapse have upper bounds on size too small to account for these large black holes. The article mentions two hypotheses, primordial black holes somehow formed in the first second after the big bang, and direct collapse of large gas clouds into a black hole. It's also very exciting to have an explanation for one of the many many "red dots" that were first spotted by JWST and have been very mysterious. If all these were super massive black holes without galaxies that would be fascinating.
curtisszmania 1y ago
[dead]
boopity2025 1y ago
[flagged]
- BugsJustFindMe 1y ago
  > It’s pure hydrogen The gas around it is pure hydrogen. We can't know what's inside. Could be stacks of little green men and ponies in there.
  - ndsipa_pomu 1y ago
    Arguably, it makes no difference at all as to what's inside (apart from the inference that the early universe had lots of singularity seeking ponies and little green men)
  - catchclose 1y ago
    Maybe, lazy or tired light, and everything shifts towards specific spectral lines or frequencies/wavelengths at distant observation. Attenuates? Asymptotes to the hydrogen line?
    - adgjlsfhk1 1y ago
      that doesn't work out. from the spectra we're seeing hydrogen spikes red shifted, so the lack of any other spikes is very strong evidence
      - catchclose 1y ago
        !
    - jfengel 1y ago
      If light got tired it would make ordinary chemistry impossible. You wouldn't see spectra because atoms themselves would work differently (and probably not at all). The fact that we can tell that it's hydrogen makes it extremely unlikely that light behaved differently there.
- 1y ago
andreareina 1y ago
N.B. This is a supermassive black hole without a galaxy, not a naked singularity. The cosmic censorship hypothesis is still safe.
- Quarrel 1y ago
  I'd certainly hope the headline would be a bit more dramatic if they'd found a naked singularity!
- yawpitch 1y ago
  The Universe, modestly redacting its genitals from view since 0 + 1 Planck times.
codethief 1y ago
> the early universe was building them in parallel with — or before — galaxies Reminds me of the "blowtorch theory"[0] discussed here on HN a while ago. [0]: https://theeggandtherock.com/p/the-blowtorch-theory-a-new-model https://theeggandtherock.com/p/the-blowtorch-theory-a-new-mo...
- gus_massa 1y ago
  HN discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44115973 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44115973 (187 points | 3 months ago | 180 comments) Note that in spite of the name it's not a "theory" that gives an clear and accurate prediction. We mix results of many theories, like electromagnetism, general relativity dopler effect, atoms ionization and spectrum, centripetal force, ... to get an accurate prediction and error estimation of how much mass a galaxy must have. Different calculations disagree, so we are forced to try to fix the theory (MOND) or guess there is dome difficut to see mass (dark matter). The "blowtorch theory" is only a few general ideas and handwaving, without clear and precice calculations. So it's impossible to know if it explains all the current data (without dark matter) or even if the predictions digree so much with the current data that we need even more weird stuff to match it.
  - zero_bias 1y ago
    > Note that in spite of the name it's not a "theory" that gives an clear and accurate prediction. It does make verifiable predictions, and moreover, these predictions are much easier to test than those of string theory, which involves a lot of mathematics but is still not considered a scientific theory because it is impossible to verify
- farnsworth 1y ago
  I absolutely don't know enough to know how legit or ridiculous that idea is, but it's been stuck in my head ever since I read about it here, and it's been fun to mull over.
Dr_Loo 1y ago
Symbolic Nakedness at Cosmic Dawn: SFIT Validation on A2744-QSO1 and the Little Red Dot Phase We introduce the concept of symbolic nakedness within the SFIT (Symbolic Field Invariant Topology) framework and evaluate it using recent observations of A2744-QSO1, a triply imaged, high-redshift quasar candidate at $z\sim7$. In SFIT, symbolic nakedness is defined by a quadruple criterion: (i) horizon breach, quantified by $H(r)=2M(r)/r>1$; (ii) localized collapse intensity, $\rho(s)>\rho_{\max}$; (iii) entropic flux leakage, $L(\Omega)>\varepsilon$; and (iv) absence of topological shielding. Applying this diagnostic to the “Little Red Dot” phase of QSO1, we find all four conditions satisfied: the inferred black hole mass ($\sim 5\times10^{7},M_\odot$) exceeds containment limits, spectral features imply steep gradients, X-ray weakness and Balmer-line strength indicate non-standard flux, and no host bulge or enclosing structure is detected. Within SFIT, QSO1 therefore represents a symbolically naked singularity. The framework is falsifiable: discovery of a massive host or standard X-ray corona would negate this classification. More generally, symbolic nakedness provides a cross-domain diagnostic for unshielded structural collapse, from molecular entanglement to primordial black holes.

196 points by pykello 1y ago

”By reconstructing the vortex, the team directly measured the mass of the object it was orbiting: 50 million times more massive than our sun.” Is that not an indirect measurement?

dotancohen 1y ago
It is the most direct measurement that astronomers have. That said, I do agree that the word "directly" should not have been in that sentence.
actionfromafar 1y ago
Even scales measure indirectly.

reactordev 1y ago

If the theory of abnormal galaxy formation hold up, then the Big Bang was spitting out both simultaneously. Maybe there’s a mathematical “tipping point” for mass where the weight of it crushes the atoms? Resulting in early black holes from abnormal matter… not from a collapse but just from mass being in close proximity. There still so much to learn…

gus_massa 1y ago
> “tipping point” for mass where the weight of it crushes the atoms? If you have a material of constant density like water, bananas or rocks, then if you have a ball that is big enough you get a neutron star where all the atoms collapsed in a huge-mega-super-nuclei. (I think the surface may have some normal atoms, and the center may be even more strange.) If the ball is even more big enough you get a black hole. If you use a gas like Hydrogen that has no constant density, the calculation is similar, but more complex. IANAA, but I expect that the collapse into the black hole does not capture the 100% of the initial mass if the object is a rotating irregular blob, so in this huge cases near the big bang I expect the leftover to form something that looks like a galaxy. And the lack of leftover is what is surprising. (Again, IANAA.) Except in neutron stars and black holes, atoms are very stable. There are many conservation laws, like the number of leptons (like the electron) and barions (like the proton/neutron) that make it hard to create weird stuff. You can create weird stuff for a very short time, but almost immediately it goes back to normal stuff. As always, there may be some surprise in particle physics, but I don't remember or expect something like this.
- IAmBroom 1y ago
  > Except in neutron stars and black holes, atoms are very stable. Radioactive elements excepted, of course. And when they get struck by ionizing photons. So I would rather say: non-radioactive atomic nuclei are stable.
  - Workaccount2 1y ago
    Radioactive atoms are just unstable atoms shedding energy to until they fall into a stable atom state. It's not really atoms falling apart into non-atoms.
    - JumpCrisscross 1y ago
      To be fair, everything is stable if we restrict ourselves to their stable subsets.
      - IAmBroom 1y ago
        Exactly. It's like saying baked goods are shelf-stable because they degrade into humus, which is shelf-stable.
- reactordev 1y ago
  Not to quote a 90s New Zealand pop hit but… how bizarre!

Towaway69 1y ago

Am I the only one to see HALs eye here. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HAL_9000 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HAL_9000 Coincidence? I don't think so. /s

imperio59 1y ago

[flagged]

danparsonson 1y ago
"Scientists having to face the fact that their theories aren't perfect" - I think you fundamentally misunderstand how science works, or else you hang out with some extremely arrogant astronomers. Why do you think they put the JWST up there, if not to get better data and thereby improve our understanding of the universe? If we thought our theories were already perfect, what would be the point in doing more research?
- PantaloonFlames 1y ago
  > Why do you think they put the JWST up there, if not to get better data and thereby improve our understanding of the universe? Think about how much effort scientists had to make, to bring JWST into existence. The funding proposals, the design, the engineering to get it launched. Generations of effort, entire careers dedicated just to making it happen. All of that effort sings one song: we don’t know, and we want to learn.
mapt 1y ago
You are regurgitating almost pure grievance against people who just want to study the universe. Every researcher in every field all the time wants more data, better studies, more evidence. That is basically what science is. This attitude about "those damn smug scientists who think they know everything" emerges from authoritarian nationalists selling resentment politics, and it has led to widespread violence against scientists in the past. Its prevalence in Germany is one part of why the US got the bomb first, and its prevalence in the Soviet and Chinese systems is part of why were not able to keep up with us economically (until recently). This political project actively intends to defend enterprises like JWST (sometimes even after building and launching the damn thing!), and current budgets have dozens of existing projects being shut down for good.
- analog31 1y ago

aleatorianator 1y ago

[flagged]

api 1y ago

Primordial black holes seem likely since many models predict them. They’re not a fringe idea. They are also a dark matter candidate, though this is more controversial. The ones we are seeing here would be huge ones but their masses could range the spectrum. Smaller ones would have evaporated already but there could be tons of asteroid, moon, and planetary mass ones around. At least some dark matter may be black holes the size of a hydrogen atom with the mass of an asteroid, and similar objects. These would be incredibly hard to detect. The only way would be their gravitational effects on other bodies or weak anomalous radiation bursts when they rarely encounter matter. They’re also awesome and weird. One could, for example, shoot right through the Earth. If it was small nothing might happen. Larger ones might cause seismic events or perhaps Tunguska type events due to induced fusion in the atmosphere. What was Tunguska anyway? The most exciting thing is that if small mass PBHs exist and are common enough, we could find one someday in our solar system, maybe captured as a moon or in an asteroid belt. That would be close enough to send a probe to go look at it and do experiments with it. Being able to directly examine a black hole could be the thing that lets us “finish” physics. It would let us see conditions far beyond anything any imaginable terrestrial accelerator could ever produce.

WaxProlix 1y ago
I encountered a theory that 'planet x' might be such a PBH, explaining its ability to gravitationally impact post Neptunian bodies and its elusiveness. Would be incredibly cool to have something so exotic (or commonplace?) so close to home. Cool idea on Tunguska - would such an explanation make predictions that we could verify? Radioactivity or changes to carbon in stones or the rings of local trees... An interesting thought.
- api 1y ago
  If planet X exists and is a planetary mass PBH it could unlock the universe in many ways. We could use it as a gravitational slingshot to fire probes at significant fractions of the speed of light out for flyby surveys of other solar systems.
  - 1y ago

a3w 1y ago

I thought a naked singularity was a white hole, one without an event horizon. And physicists hate that idea, but expect to never find one anyway.

tsimionescu 1y ago
A white hole is a completely different object, the opposite of a black hole, not a baked singularity. A white hole is an area of spacetime that no mass/energy (even light) can ever reach - versus a black hole which no mass/energy can escape. However, my understanding of what a naked singularity means is still in conflict with the article. I understood a naked singularity to be a black hole that is larger than its event horizon, such that it's possible to reach the singularity and then come back from it.
- JumpCrisscross 1y ago
  > A white hole is an area of spacetime that no mass/energy (even light) can ever reach Would the Big Bang be a white hole?
  - andrewflnr 1y ago
    IIRC the math is in fact very similar if not identical between a white hole and the Big Bang. But I don't actually know the math, so...
    - rvba 1y ago
      No one ever shows the math anywhere. They just write that it is hard, or that it doesnt work. It became basically some sort of a pseudo religion. On a side note Lard Hadron Collider is safe from micro black holes due to Hawking radiation. Issue is, that there does not seem to be any proof for Hawking radiation. It's just a model. Probably correct, but perhaps not. So the argument about LHC safety is flawed from the start and apparently anyone who points this out is "anti science". Sadly as I wrote science in some parts is a bizarre parody of itself, more like some cult. You cannot point out logical flaws anymore. Expecting mass downvotes for this post, with no rebuttal. Because scientists are never wrong. What about (yes - what-aboutism) the reproductivity problem...

graycat 1y ago

Have the black hole primal and then "naked" due to the early, rapid expansion?

zero_bias 1y ago
When primordial black holes formed, there was no matter that could clump around them, as the matter at that time had a very high temperature

w10-1 1y ago

Naive outsider here... The "single naked" titling is a bit misleading, since there are hundreds of these challenging current theory. But how often are those we do see are replicated in the so-call smear of lensing? Does this instance (QSO1) presenting 3 times create more analysis opportunities? E.g., the 7.3-hour observation that produced higher-resolution data that checked out as a vortex of hydrogen: would we expect to see the same features in all three images (modulo lensing transforms)? Reading that preprint (at [1]), it seemed they only used 1 of 3 (image A). [1] preprint: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.21748 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.21748

gigatexal 1y ago

as a connoisseur of all the outlets (YouTube and other publications) that make really tough astrophysics easy for the layman I just love this. I've seen everything I could understand on YouTube about blackholes. I just find them so fascinating. And this is really, really cool.

dreamcompiler 1y ago

I didn't see any mention of angular momentum. If a gas cloud has essentially no angular momentum relative to its center of mass, it will collapse directly into a BH, no? If angular momentum exists, you get a galaxy.

andrewflnr 1y ago
> The scientists found that bright material — likely hot gas — swirled around in a furious vortex, one that backed up Furtak’s preliminary findings. Which is probably science-journalist for "has an accretion disk". That enough angular momentum for you?
pantulis 1y ago
There are a bazillion ways to rotate but only one way to not rotate. I'd say that the probability of a gas cloud without angular momentum is as low as to be indistinguishable from zero.
1270018080 1y ago
It's effectively impossible to have no angular momentum with these processes.
perihelions 1y ago
It's all spinning around the BH, and spins faster the closer to the BH it is. It was actually the core point of this particular experiment to measure how fast it's spinning; the paper's title is "A direct black hole mass measurement...", and the way they're doing that is "dynamical BH mass measurement"—i.e. measuring how fast gas spins around it, and applying kinematic laws.

epistasis 1y ago

> “The most plausible explanation seems to be [that] the black hole developed before the galaxy,” said Marta Volonteri (opens a new tab), a theorist at the Paris Institute of Astrophysics who helped with the new analysis of QSO1. For those that like science communication in video form, Becky Smethurst's YouTube channel has a ton of great info on super massive blackholes, and cosmology in general, from a practitioner in the field. Here's one from a month ago about the evidence (then) for whether super massive black holes or galaxies came first: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B9yDWbilIG4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B9yDWbilIG4 The science appears to be moving very quickly with all the new info from JWST.

robofanatic 1y ago

So does that mean these naked blackholes are weaker than those surrounding them, hence unable to pull anything towards them?

epistasis 1y ago
Not at all, this is the size of a supermassive black hole, 50 million times the mass of the sun, like the one at the center of every galaxy. Sagittarius A*, the super massive black hole at the center of the Milky Way, only has a mass of 4 million suns. They have always been a mystery, because it's not entirely known how these supermassive black holes could have formed, since the known methods of star collapse have upper bounds on size too small to account for these large black holes. The article mentions two hypotheses, primordial black holes somehow formed in the first second after the big bang, and direct collapse of large gas clouds into a black hole. It's also very exciting to have an explanation for one of the many many "red dots" that were first spotted by JWST and have been very mysterious. If all these were super massive black holes without galaxies that would be fascinating.

curtisszmania 1y ago

[dead]

boopity2025 1y ago

[flagged]

BugsJustFindMe 1y ago
> It’s pure hydrogen The gas around it is pure hydrogen. We can't know what's inside. Could be stacks of little green men and ponies in there.
- ndsipa_pomu 1y ago
  Arguably, it makes no difference at all as to what's inside (apart from the inference that the early universe had lots of singularity seeking ponies and little green men)
- catchclose 1y ago
  Maybe, lazy or tired light, and everything shifts towards specific spectral lines or frequencies/wavelengths at distant observation. Attenuates? Asymptotes to the hydrogen line?
  - adgjlsfhk1 1y ago
    that doesn't work out. from the spectra we're seeing hydrogen spikes red shifted, so the lack of any other spikes is very strong evidence
    - catchclose 1y ago
      !
  - jfengel 1y ago
    If light got tired it would make ordinary chemistry impossible. You wouldn't see spectra because atoms themselves would work differently (and probably not at all). The fact that we can tell that it's hydrogen makes it extremely unlikely that light behaved differently there.
1y ago

andreareina 1y ago

N.B. This is a supermassive black hole without a galaxy, not a naked singularity. The cosmic censorship hypothesis is still safe.

Quarrel 1y ago
I'd certainly hope the headline would be a bit more dramatic if they'd found a naked singularity!
yawpitch 1y ago
The Universe, modestly redacting its genitals from view since 0 + 1 Planck times.

codethief 1y ago

> the early universe was building them in parallel with — or before — galaxies Reminds me of the "blowtorch theory"[0] discussed here on HN a while ago. [0]: https://theeggandtherock.com/p/the-blowtorch-theory-a-new-model https://theeggandtherock.com/p/the-blowtorch-theory-a-new-mo...

gus_massa 1y ago
HN discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44115973 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44115973 (187 points | 3 months ago | 180 comments) Note that in spite of the name it's not a "theory" that gives an clear and accurate prediction. We mix results of many theories, like electromagnetism, general relativity dopler effect, atoms ionization and spectrum, centripetal force, ... to get an accurate prediction and error estimation of how much mass a galaxy must have. Different calculations disagree, so we are forced to try to fix the theory (MOND) or guess there is dome difficut to see mass (dark matter). The "blowtorch theory" is only a few general ideas and handwaving, without clear and precice calculations. So it's impossible to know if it explains all the current data (without dark matter) or even if the predictions digree so much with the current data that we need even more weird stuff to match it.
- zero_bias 1y ago
  > Note that in spite of the name it's not a "theory" that gives an clear and accurate prediction. It does make verifiable predictions, and moreover, these predictions are much easier to test than those of string theory, which involves a lot of mathematics but is still not considered a scientific theory because it is impossible to verify
farnsworth 1y ago
I absolutely don't know enough to know how legit or ridiculous that idea is, but it's been stuck in my head ever since I read about it here, and it's been fun to mull over.

Dr_Loo 1y ago

Symbolic Nakedness at Cosmic Dawn: SFIT Validation on A2744-QSO1 and the Little Red Dot Phase We introduce the concept of symbolic nakedness within the SFIT (Symbolic Field Invariant Topology) framework and evaluate it using recent observations of A2744-QSO1, a triply imaged, high-redshift quasar candidate at $z\sim7$. In SFIT, symbolic nakedness is defined by a quadruple criterion: (i) horizon breach, quantified by $H(r)=2M(r)/r>1$; (ii) localized collapse intensity, $\rho(s)>\rho_{\max}$; (iii) entropic flux leakage, $L(\Omega)>\varepsilon$; and (iv) absence of topological shielding. Applying this diagnostic to the “Little Red Dot” phase of QSO1, we find all four conditions satisfied: the inferred black hole mass ($\sim 5\times10^{7},M_\odot$) exceeds containment limits, spectral features imply steep gradients, X-ray weakness and Balmer-line strength indicate non-standard flux, and no host bulge or enclosing structure is detected. Within SFIT, QSO1 therefore represents a symbolically naked singularity. The framework is falsifiable: discovery of a massive host or standard X-ray corona would negate this classification. More generally, symbolic nakedness provides a cross-domain diagnostic for unshielded structural collapse, from molecular entanglement to primordial black holes.