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Astronomers find an ancient black hole the size of 12B suns
- zhyder 12y agoDid the big bang and immediate expansion necessarily distribute matter uniformly? If not, couldn't this just be the dumb luck of this black hole that it started its life itself with many solar masses, so it didn't need to accrete as much in the next 900 million years?
- simonh 12y agoThe idea is that the incredibly fast inflation immediately following the big bang smeared out the mass and energy of the universe very thinly, so that any unevenness got flattened out.
- mrng 12y agoArxiv paper, with more relevant (albeit highly specialized) information than Nature's abstract: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1410.2689.pdf http://arxiv.org/pdf/1410.2689.pdf
- privong 12y agoThat is not the same paper. The preprint you linked was published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, and discusses a different quasar (SDSS J013127.34-032100.1, at a redshift of z=2.5). The Nature paper is about SDSS J010013.02+280225.8, at redshift z = 6.30. The author list is similar, so it is likely the same team. But the arxiv link is a different discovery.
- privong 12y agoI made a typo: the linked paper in the parent comment to mine is about an object at redshift z=5.18, not z=2.5.
- AshFurrow 12y agoMass, not size. Come on, this is basic astrophysics!
- semaphoreP 12y agoTechnically, the radius of a black hole is uniquely determined by its mass, so one can construct a unit system where mass and radius use the same unit of measure...
- tjradcliffe 12y agoI want to see that: "How many solar masses is it from Paris to London again?" (115... it's actually a kind of convenient unit, quite close to half an English league and just a bit larger than a Roman league.) Or: "Man! I stepped on the scales today and I've put on another ten million Planck lengths!"
- jen729w 12y agoRandall has us covered, as always. http://xkcd.com/687/ http://xkcd.com/687/ and "You can even plug it into Wolfram|Alpha, and it’ll tell you that 20 MPG is about 0.1 square millimeters (roughly the area of two pixels on a computer screen)." https://what-if.xkcd.com/11/ https://what-if.xkcd.com/11/
- hamoid 12y agoThat unit system might allow comparing black holes to other black holes. But our sun does not have the same density as a black hole, or? The nature article [1] does not compare it to the size of our sun, but to its mass. [1] http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v518/n7540/full/nature14241.html http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v518/n7540/full/nature1...
- Retric 12y agoActually, black holes density decreases linearly as their mass increases. So, there could easily be a black hole with a density of the sun with supper massive black holes having a density near that of water. (Where density = mass / volume inside event horizon). Because Gravity ~= Mass/distance ^ 2 but volume is 4/3 pi * r ^ 3
- oafitupa 12y agoWe already knew about several black holes more massive than that though (the news seems to be about how ancient it is too, not just its mass): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_massive_black_holes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_massive_black_hol...
- beastman82 12y agoThings like this make me very skeptical that the accepted model is correct.
- privong 12y ago> Things like this make me very skeptical that the accepted model is correct. To which "accepted model" are you referring – the cosmological model for the Universe, the determination of black hole masses, the formation and growth of supermassive black holes, or something else? As @nilkn notes, this discovery is in conflict with existing models of the formation and growth of (some) supermassive black holes, which is a reason this paper is in Nature.
- kordless 12y agoI'll say it. We're running in a virtual machine. There.
- nfoz 12y ago...and I get the eery feeling sometimes that it's running Windows 95.
- colechristensen 12y agohttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holographic_principle http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holographic_principle
- cocoablazing 12y agoThe usefulness of the HP is principally in the application of the aDS/cft duality to otherwise intractable calculations. It doesn't have anything to do with the universe being virtual or computable. Perhaps you are thinking of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_physics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_physics.
- nilkn 12y agoBecause of its mass, its luminosity, or its age? Several black holes have already been identified with masses of this magnitude. However, it seems that the age of this black hole is indeed problematic, as indicated by the article: > For the black hole to grow to such a staggering size in less than a billion years, the astronomers posit, it must have been pulling in interstellar mass from its surroundings at the maximum rate the whole time. Even so, the radiation of the quasar formed by the black hole should have started to limit that mass accumulation before such a size was reached.
- PinnBrain 12y agoCan we see it with less than a million bucks (or a trip to Wyoming)?
- GigabyteCoin 12y ago>It was even detectable with a relatively small telescope, though researchers in China did have to ask for help from astronomers in Chile and the United States to get a higher-resolution look.
- keypusher 12y agoI have a feeling that "relatively small" telescopes which find new black holes to publish in Nature are still quite expensive by normal person standards.
- BAMartelly 12y agoHow Douglas-Adams funny would it be if the mega black hole had somehow been created by someone spilling their coffee on a keyboard at the CERN LHC
- fit2rule 12y ago11.
- i2i 12y agoI love the timing of this with the release of a new/old theory that the universe has always existed : http://zeenews.india.com/news/space/no-big-bang-new-theory-suggests-universe-always-existed_1544948.html http://zeenews.india.com/news/space/no-big-bang-new-theory-s... This would make the age of the this black hole less of a mystery. I always new that there was a relationship between black holes and quasars (In/Out) but was unaware that there was an established relationship between specific events. Does anyone have links to this ?
- TbobbyZ 12y agoI came here to say this. I'm glad you beat me to it!
- wozniacki 12y agoCosmology from quantum potential ( Ahmed Farag Ali, Saurya Das ) It was shown recently that replacing classical geodesics with quantal (Bohmian) trajectories gives rise to a quantum corrected Raychaudhuri equation (QRE). In this article we derive the second order Friedmann equations from the QRE, and show that this also contains a couple of quantum correction terms, the first of which can be interpreted as cosmological constant (and gives a correct estimate of its observed value), while the second as a radiation term in the early universe, which gets rid of the big-bang singularity and predicts an infinite age of our universe. [1] [1] http://arxiv.org/pdf/1404.3093v3.pdf http://arxiv.org/pdf/1404.3093v3.pdf
- saiya-jin 12y agoIf universe is older than big bang, why don't we see anything older than that? I mean, there isnt such a drop in visibility of galaxy/bright object that is 5 billion vs 10 bilion years old. So, where are all 30 or more billion year old objects? Maybe there wasn't ultimate singularity in the beginning, but universe is definitely not the same no matter how far you look in the past.
- ccozan 12y agoI think the answer is here [1]. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observable_universe#Misconceptions_on_its_size http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observable_universe#Misconcepti...
- antognini 12y agoTo put this result in context, an important open question in astronomy is how supermassive black holes are formed. There are currently two viable formation mechanisms: 1. The bottom-up model: After the first generation of star formation, the most massive stars formed black holes with masses somewhere between 10-100 solar masses. These then began accreting material and merging with each other and gradually grew into the supermassive black holes we see today. 2. The direct collapse model: As galaxies were forming, there was generally a concentration of gas at the bottom of each galaxy's potential well. If this cloud were dense enough, under the right conditions it could collapse directly into a ~10^4-10^6 solar mass black hole without fragmenting into individual stars. The bottom-up model has historically been considered more plausible because the physics involved is better understood. However, discoveries of very massive black holes very early in the lifetime of the universe are starting to pose very serious challenges for this model. The reason is that black holes cannot grow arbitrarily rapidly. The rate at which a black hole can accrete matter is limited by the "Eddington accretion rate" or the "Eddington limit." Above the Eddington limit the gas gets so hot as it accretes onto the black hole that radiation from the infalling gas blows away the rest of the gas. (There are many details in this process which I have glossed over, but suffice to say it's generally difficult to get an accretion rate that is much more than this limit.) If you start out with a black hole with a mass of ~100 solar masses and you feed it constantly at the Eddington limit, you can just barely grow black holes large enough to power the quasars we see in the early universe. But as more distant and more massive black holes are discovered, it gets harder and harder to grow a stellar mass black hole into a supermassive black hole in the age that the universe has existed at that time, and you have to invoke mechanisms like super-Eddington accretion and black hole mergers to grow a large enough black hole. This may be possible for individual black holes, but the more fine-tuned the model becomes, the less likely it is to be the primary channel by which supermassive black holes form. These sorts of discoveries are therefore providing evidence that the simple bottom-up picture may not be correct and either super-Eddington accretion, mergers, or direct collapse is necessary to form these black holes.
- cLeEOGPw 12y agoWhat could have prevented supermassive black holes to exist from the very start? It would seem quite natural that at the start there were many supermassive black holes with gas around, and so around these holes galaxies formed because of gravitational pull. But if this theory is true, that means there should exist supermassive black holes that don't have their galaxies, or have size mismatches between galaxy and black hole (hole way too big for the size of galaxy). But if they were there from the start and gas distribution were semi even in the universe, then it would be possible that each black hole that popped into existence from the start of big bang got it's own galaxy.
- Lerc 12y ago>420 trillion times more luminous than our sun So that would have a Habitable zone? How far away and how large?
- nitrogen 12y agoIgnoring all other considerations, one could produce a distance using the inverse square law.
- Retra 12y agoWould that just mean taking the square root of the luminosity and interpreting it as distance in AUs?
- Lerc 12y agoSo... https://www.google.com/search?q=sqrt%28420*10^12%29au+in+light+years https://www.google.com/search?q=sqrt%28420*10^12%29au+in+lig... 324 lightyears. Assuming Sol habitable is 0.7 to 1.2au the translated would be 227 to 389. A shell of thickness approximately 160 light years where everything is in the habitable zone (as long as it is not too close to another heat source)
- venomsnake 12y agoProbably stupid question, but do we have solid evidence that the laws of physics/constants were the same/behaved the same back then? I know that to be true for the last couple of billion years. But so early in the development of the universe?
- kryptiskt 12y agoYes, we have evidence going very far back, for example, the abundances of light elements were set in the first minutes of the big bang, and they have been successfully interpreted with nuclear physics as we know it.
- timClicks 12y agoIIRC the laws of nature for this universe were set a few nanoseconds after the big bang. Around the time of inflation.
- tim333 12y agoYou can get evidence by observing the early universe with telescopes and the like. I don't think anyone has observed the laws/constants being noticeably different although you can't really prove a negative.
- privong 12y agoYou can put limits on how much they could have changed, though. And people do this, e.g., [0], which found the proton-to-electron mass ratio has not varied by more than a relative factor of 4e-7, over the past 7.5 billion years. [0] http://arxiv.org/abs/1412.7757 http://arxiv.org/abs/1412.7757
- scotty79 12y agoWhat if it was two supermassive blackholes rotating around center of mass? Could we tell the difference? Wouldn't time around them be slowed so much that it would look like they don't move at all?
- amelius 12y agoThe term to search for would be "supermassive black hole binaries". Apparently, these systems have a characteristic fingerprint. http://arstechnica.com/science/2015/01/supermassive-black-hole-binary-discovered/ http://arstechnica.com/science/2015/01/supermassive-black-ho...