Colliding Galaxies Reveal Colossal Black Holes 134
Matt_dk writes "New observations made with the Submillimeter Array of telescopes in Hawaii suggest that black holes — thought to exist in many, if not all, galaxies — were common even in the early Universe, when galaxies were just beginning to form. Astronomers have found two very different galaxies in the distant Universe, both with colossal black holes at their hearts, involved in a spectacular collision."
Re:Apparently. . . (Score:4, Insightful)
It was particularly evil to have the link in the words 'spectacular collision' :/
Re:In those galaxies (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Very simple, actually (Score:4, Insightful)
I would encourage you to study what a black hole actually is, rather than trusting some random sci-fi author's unsubstantiated notion that the layman's term "hole" must mean "magical portal to another dimension".
Our present equations yield a value of "infinite" when solved for the conditions believed to exist at the center of a black hole. This is likely to only mean that our equations are buggy and need fixing.
It is not the opinion of most scientists that anything special would happen inside a black hole. If you could somehow build an infinitely resilient spaceship that could somehow shield you from the effects of extreme gravity, and assuming we are wrong about the speed of light, and that you could possibly go faster than it, the most you would be able to do with a black hole would be to go in and out of the event horizon unscathed, or perhaps bang into whatever form of extremely compressed matter exists at its center. We have no reason to believe otherwise - wormholes, however prevalent they may be in the realm of science fiction, are just an unlikely hypothesis in the world of real science. For them to exist, strange forms of matter with negative density would have to be discovered, and nobody but the wishful thinkers seriously believes in that.
(I am not a physicist, however, and as such I welcome factual corrections and additions to this post)
Re:Layman's question (Score:4, Insightful)
No.
Maintaining an outward velocity = c would keep you at the event horizon indefinitely. Add a sideways component and you'd be able to orbit, but at velocity > c. Anything lower and you'd need velocity > c just to maintain height, much less to orbit.
If you could go fast enough you might be able to make a few passes in some sort of collapsing orbit, but a stable orbit would be impossible.
Re:It doesn't seem that surprising. (Score:3, Insightful)
Compress it all into a neat little ball, and at some point, that ball will go bang.
Actually the evidence suggests that you if you keep compressing the ball a bang becomes very unlikely. Once matter is pile onto the singularity, about the only way it seems to come back off it through Hawking Radiation, which is more of a "Little, Slow, Trickle" than a Big Bang.