Monster Black Hole Busts Theory

Genocaust writes "A stellar black hole much more massive than theory predicts is possible has astronomers puzzled. Stellar black holes form when stars with masses around 20 times that of the sun collapse under the weight of their own gravity at the ends of their lives. Most stellar black holes weigh in at around 10 solar masses when the smoke blows away, and computer models of star evolution have difficulty producing black holes more massive than this. The newly weighed black hole is 16 solar masses. It orbits a companion star in the spiral galaxy Messier 33, located 2.7 million light-years from Earth. Together they make up the system known as M33 X-7."

Supermassive black holes

[Raul654]

If theory says that black holes beyond 10 solar masses cannot form, how do they explain the conjectured supermassive black holes [wikipedia.org] at the center of our and other galaxies?

Re:Supermassive black holes

[RuBLed]

It seems that they are in separate divisions/classes. This should explain it.

While 16 solar masses is hefty for a stellar black hole, it is miniscule compared with the black holes thought to lie in the heart of many large galaxies. Such "supermassive" black holes have masses millions to billions times that of our sun, but they are thought to form by mechanisms different from the stellar variety.

Re:

[buswolley]

I think parent's intent was to make a joke, not to be insightful.

Re:

[bombastinator]

Nah. It's a reasonable question. "stellar" is not necessarily generally thought of as a term of finite measurement outside of Academia.

Re:Supermassive black holes

[Oktober Sunset]

No, if they were making a joke, they would have mentioned the supermassive black hole shown at goatse.cx, which is far bigger than most nerds thought possible.

Re:Supermassive black holes

[shawn(at)fsu]

They mentioned that in the article. Mister Scientist thinks their are different mechacisms at work that produce the super massive black holes at the centre of galaxies. I was wondering though, is it possible that a black hole of this mass could me produces in a trinary solar system where two black holes merge, in this case leaving you with a 16 solar masses and orbiting the remain star?

Re:Supermassive black holes

[jd]

What if you have an n-ary system in which two or more supermassive stars are sufficiently close together that after the supernova, the total mass exceeds 10 solar masses even though no individual star did? (Since the star cores would merge at the common center of gravity, they would behave as a single remnant of the combined mass, NOT as individual collapsing objects.) Alternatively, if the black hole forms in a regular fashion but is in a dense enough zone - or a zone that has an obscenely large number of extra-solar supermassive planets - that it absorbs six or more solar masses before it can evaporate a comparable amount of mass, you'd reach the desired mass. Thirdly, my guess is that all simulations assume point singularities (probably the most common kind, assuming black hole theory is correct), which means that they won't be including Kerr Ring singularities or any of the other Really Weird Forms that have been predicted.

I'm sure that there are ways to fudge things so that the desired mass can be reached. Or, there again, the simulations could be wrong. That happens, for all that Michael Fish wishes otherwise. Well, maybe not. He stands to make a lot of money from his new book because of that fiasco.

Re:Supermassive black holes

[gomiam]

Reading the article, it seems that the computer models of supernovas would strip all those supermassive planets of their gaseous layers, if not blow the planets themselves away. The problem isn't the black hole being that big (that's a symptom), the problem is how do you make a star go nova "softly" like this one would have done.

And, yes, it seems the simulations are wrong. That's why it's hard for the current nova theories (read models) to create a black hole this big.

Supermassive gaseous layers exploding softly

[bombastinator]

Could someone else here who also knows nothing about stellar physics read this thread and tell me it does not all sound like some weird double entendre fart joke?

Re:

[gomiam]

That would be expected when talking about black holes and explosions.

Re:

[bombastinator]

Thank you. It's good that someone understands.

Re:Supermassive black holes

[chthon]

Wouldn't it be : In Soviet Russia, you eat black holes ?

Re:

[ultranova]

Wouldn't it be : In Soviet Russia, you eat black holes ?

Well, seeing how both people and goods had a habit of disappearing and never being seen again in Soviet Russia, I'd say that both forms are correct. I wonder if that reflects some deep, underlaying symmetry in the Laws of Politics ?

As an interesting aside, the light emitted near the event horizon of a black hole experiences red shift as it climbs up the gravitational field, and the Soviet Russia's flag is... red. Does that mean that Soviet Russia

Re:

[octal666]

I think laws of physics are the same inside and outside of Soviet Russia, no joke here, move along.

Re:Supermassive black holes

[Anonymous Coward]

In Soviet Russia, you eat black holes

In Russia, black holes are referred to as 'frozen stars', because 'black hole' in Russian is a slang term referring to the anus. Which leads to a rather unintentional interpretation of your post.

Re:

[Tablizer]

I was wondering though, is it possible that a black hole of this mass could me produces in a trinary solar system where two black holes merge, in this case leaving you with a 16 solar masses and orbiting the remain star?

If I am not mistaken, the largest stars tend not to be binary/trinary. Once the mass gets past a certain point, it upsets the harmonics needed to make doubles and triples. However, I can't find any verification of this mentally rusty snippet of info.

Pairs don't merge very often

[Tablizer]

Another issue is the unlikely chance of paired stars crashing into each other. After one partner blows its top at the end of life, it usually loses some mass such that the distance between them INcreases, making them even less likely to touch or enter friction zones. (Being a black hole by itself does not increase its gravitational pull over a star of the same mass). If they are going to merge, they would more likely do so during the regular life, and we'd see samples of such massive stars. But we don't, mainly because there is an upper limit to the size of a stable star.

Further, large stars have short lives, meaning that the time for friction to rub them closer to each other is shorter.

However, it is true that a collision of two big mid-life stars may itself trigger a supernova because the total mass exceeds a stable size, and thus a very large black hole is formed. This may result in a black hole that *looks* like it came from a star larger than the max stable size of a star because its exceeding the stable limit itself is what triggered the formation of the hole. In short, there may be a limit to stable star size, but not to unstable star size.
   

Re:Supermassive black holes

[Anonymous Coward]

Just FYI: after binary comes TERNARY, not trinary. Don't feel bad, though, it's a very common mistake which I myself have made before being corrected.

Re:Supermassive black holes

[Chapter80]

Just FYI: after binary comes TERNARY, not trinary

Regarding base-2, I've seen posts that don't talk about it, and posts that contain the term "binary".

Regarding base-3, I've seen posts that don't talk about it, and posts that use the term "trinary", and posts that use the term "ternary".

Seems about right...

Re:

[aliquis]

Why? Do you know the names for four, five and so on aswell?

Re:

[QuickFox]

after binary comes TERNARY, not trinary.

According to this [reference.com], trinary is okay too, at least to mean "consisting of three parts, or proceeding by three" (while they have a longer list of definitions for ternary [reference.com]).

Re:Supermassive black holes

[dwater]

> their are

you misspelled 'arse'.

Re:

[ILuvRamen]

I was thinking the same thing. And you know how they get that big? By forming and then sucking up tons and stars around them. And who says this one didn't form differently? It's in a binary system now but trinary systems exist. And don't say "but it didn't suck up 6 stars." They just said in the article that some stars can be 20 solar masses. That's a really badly named unit lol.

Re:

[Nefarious Wheel]

So .. that's the way things were done 2.7 million years ago. Well, back when I was just a lad...

As a kid studying cosmology I was once told that you only needed 3 solar masses of imploding stellar material to make a black hole.

Are there any theories to cover black holes made up of say, more than one galaxy? Is there any upper limit?

(Clears throat)"Beyond the blue Event Horizon, Heechee waiting for meeeee..."

Re:

[thrawn_aj]

(Clears throat)"Beyond the blue Event Horizon, Heechee waiting for meeeee..."

I LOL'D ... hard =D.

/fabulous book

//ditto the game by Legend Ent.

Re:

[lgw]

There's no theoretical upper limit from what I've read, however it can be hard to explain how large black holes can form given the current age of the universe. Given a few trillion years, large black holes should be common.

Re:

[osu-neko]

Yes, it's extremely hard to figure out how what you just said could possibly happen. If it was a ternary system, that means the three stars were in stable orbits. One forms a black hole. If no mass were lost, everything would remain in the same stable orbits. If mass were lost (which is almost certainly the case -- supernovas tend to throw off a lot of mass), then the star that becomes a black hole now has *less* grip on its companions than it did. If it doesn't lose them entirely, they should at least

Re:

[nospam007]

Just like us, stellar black holes are getting fatter, they need a diet.

Re:

[Warg! The Orcs!!]

Perhaps because the mass of our Sun is a variable, as is the mass of other stars. Matter falls in, matter gets expelled. Today a star might be 3 solar masses, tomorrow it might be 2.999999999999999999999999999999999976 solar masses. That sort of wild, erratic variation is no good in the exact world of astronomy.

Re:

[Dragonslicer]

Today a star might be 3 solar masses, tomorrow it might be 2.999999999999999999999999999999999976 solar masses.

Do astronomers know the mass of any other stars or black holes out to that many significant digits? If not, it doesn't really matter, does it?

That sort of wild, erratic variation is no good in the exact world of astronomy.

Astronomy is only as exact as the instruments used to take measurements.

Re:Supermassive black holes

[StikyPad]

If theory says that black holes beyond 10 solar masses cannot form, how do they explain the conjectured supermassive black holes

Like This [universetoday.com].

Or, more pedantically, black holes may never form at all [newscientist.com] from the point of view of an observer outside the event horizon.

Re:

[jotok]

From TFA:

There could be a way to test the new theory. The Large Hadron Collider being constructed at CERN in Geneva might just be capable of making microscopic black holes - or, if Vachaspati is right, black stars.

Goody. This should end well.

Unlike the large, long-lived black holes in space, these microscopic objects would evaporate fast. The spread of energies in their radiation might reveal whether or not an event horizon forms.

What exactly does "evaporate" mean when referring to black holes (stars)?

Re:

[the.Ceph]

IANAAP(I am not an astro physicist) but my understanding of it is that black holes give off a form of radiation called Hawking Radiation. As Hawking Radiation escapes the black hole its mass slowly decreases because (E=mc^2 etc). Eventually the black hole will radiate all of its mass and will have essentially evaporated.

Re:

[Frank Battaglia]

Likely they are referring to Hawking Radiation [wikipedia.org].

Say it ain't so, Joe!

[Gazzonyx]

I thought there was an article about this very subject about 2 months ago or so IIRC, and I thought the slashdot consensus was that if we were able to create these black holes (which was of slim chance), they would depart gracefully and all would be well. Thanks, I'm going to sleep well at my desk in the morning.

Can you confirm that the math is correct on this (with respect to the constraints on upper and lower limits) and that 1 second is a viable time frame for a black holes existence at this size and

Re:Supermassive black holes

[ZombieWomble]

That's something of a misleading post - while a "one second" black hole would indeed release such a huge amount of energy, the creation of such a black hole is unthinkable in the LHC: The energy the protons collide with is around 14TeV, or about 10^-6 joules. That's more than a billion billion billion times lower than the one second black hole you suggest in your post. The size of black holes produced in CERN would dissipate almost instantly, with a relatively small puff of particles.

Re:

[Dragonslicer]

So, for instance, a 1 second-lived black hole has a mass of 2.28 × 10^5 kg

Which means that in order to create such a black hole, we'd have to be able to cram 10^5 kg of mass into a singularity. That's a pretty small mass in the realm of astronomy, but it's a pretty damned big mass in the realm of particle physics.

Re:

[Goosey]

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellar-mass_black_hole [wikipedia.org]

There are different categories of Black Holes. The very wikipedia article you linked to mentioned this in the 'Formation' Section:

- Black holes of this size can form in several ways. The most obvious is by slow accretion of matter (starting from a black hole of stellar size).

TFA refers to an unexpected size for a Stellar-class Black Hole.

Re:

[Tablizer]

Agreed, that is an oddity in the story. However, I think it works like this. OUTSIDE of the center of galaxies, stars don't collide very often. Black holes have no more mass than the stars they came from (usually less because lots explode into space), and even big stars don't hit other stars very often at all. And, large stars are fairly rare, most are medium (sun-like) and smaller, reducing chances of large collisions even further. (Having lots of gravity improves collision chances a bit, but not significa

Re:

[TapeCutter]

It seems to me that black holes with a mass between 10 and 1,000,000 suns are rare but obviously not unheard of. We have also (indirectly) observed at least one star being sucked into the BH at the center of the milky way.

It seems patentently obvious that this particular BH ( and another one I read about that was ~40sols ) somehow gained mass after forming. But scientists being the skeptical critters they are prefer evidence over supposition since that is how theories are strengthened or discarded. Astro

Re:Supermassive black holes

[Junior J. Junior III]

*Stellar* black holes are black holes that originate from the aftermath of a single star going supernova.

Super-massive black holes like what exist at the center of a galaxy don't have a well understood origin, but it is supposed that if a black hole is created in a region of space with a great deal of matter in the vicinity, it may gobble up a lot of it, adding to its mass until it becomes super-massive.

A stellar black hole that's so big it shouldn't be possible for it to have been created by the usual supernova, and in a region of space sufficiently vacant to rule out the gobbling theory, is what is being puzzled over.

Re:Supermassive black holes

[ozbird]

A stellar black hole that's so big it shouldn't be possible for it to have been created by the usual supernova, and in a region of space sufficiently vacant to rule out the gobbling theory, is what is being puzzled over.

The region of space is vacant now - it doesn't mean that it was when the black hole was feeling peckish.

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[rhizome]

Super-massive black holes like what exist at the center of a galaxy don't have a well understood origin, but it is supposed that if a black hole is created in a region of space with a...

Isn't it funny how we don't even capitalize "black hole?" I'll bet anybody that in 500 years people are going to read our words and tell each other, "...they believed in these things called 'Black Holes!'" It'll be like the flat earth days.

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[digitig]

Isn't it funny how we don't even capitalize "black hole?"

Why would we? I can't think of any of the standard capitalisation rules that would apply. Unless your name happens to be Black Holes.

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[digitig]

The third rule of porn is, flatmates will make the hard drive run out of space.

Flatmates. Yeah, sure...

Re:

[anno1602]

An alternative explanation is that the supermassive black hole might have formed directly. On formation, so much mass accumulated so quickly that it directly collapsed into a black hole, bypassing the star stage entirely.

They don't form.

[Wolfier]

But nothing prevents them from being in existence since the beginning of the universe.

The existing theories only limit how black holes can be formed from less dense materials.

Re:

[Rogerborg]

If theory says that black holes beyond 10 solar masses cannot form, how do they explain the conjectured supermassive black holes [wikipedia.org] at the center of our and other galaxies?

A wizard did it. [tvtropes.org]

Re:

[kalirion]

So why couldn't this one have been made up from two stars?

In the Dark

[ArcherB]

I wonder if this is where all that "dark matter" is. Scientist keep talking about how there is so much more matter than what we can detect. Well, we haven't been able to detect this until now. How much more is missing, I wonder.

It amazes me at how much we DON'T know.

Re:

[Dr. Eggman]

Technically, there is a difference between dark matter and and matter so dense its dark. Think of dark matter as "matters at hand in the universe in which we're still in the dark." On second though, "terra incognita" is a much better analogy.

Re:

[ArcherB]

Technically, there is a difference between dark matter and and matter so dense its dark. Think of dark matter as "matters at hand in the universe in which we're still in the dark." On second though, "terra incognita" is a much better analogy.

Well, I wasn't talking about black holes being made from dark matter, but like you said, matter we were "in the dark" about or matter than we are unable to detect. Well, evidently, we were in the dark of about 75% of the matter than can exist in black holes. It wasn't

Re:In the Dark

[value_added]

It amazes me at how much we DON'T know.

The following may help to explain things (taken from an Slashdot post):

Indeed. In fact there is no light either. The Sun sucks dark. In fact it
sucks dark so hard that the friction of the dark moving to the Sun
causes the Sun to be very hot. The flow of dark towards the Sun
interrupted by the Earth causes the side of the Earth away from the Sun
to accumulate dark, thus causing Night. As the Earth rotates the dark
caught on the night side can then be pulled off, this causing the
absence of dark known as Day.

What we call light bulbs are truly dark suckers as well. That is why
light bulbs are hot, just like the Sun. When a light bulb is full of
dark and won't suck dark any more, it cools off. If you look in old
light bulbs you can even seen the accumulation of dark.

Dark is also heavier than water. This can be seen in the oceans where
the deeper you go the darker it gets.

Re:

[m2943]

It sounds silly, but at least it has the nucleus of a falsifiable theory (exercise: think about how you would falsify it experimentally if you simply didn't know and why it can't be true). That's better than a lot of the "serious" theories that are floating around.

Re:

[bentcd]

I suppose I could hold a hand close to a lightbulb, and since I feel the heat on the light side, not along the sides where "friction" should be the greatest...

I don't think that would work. The heat output from a lightbulb is likely dominated by the heat generated by the current that is powering its dark-sucking device and so the dark friction heat involved is unlikely to be noticed in comparison. You would probably need considerably more sensitive equipment than a human hand to measure it. The sun only gets as hot as it does because of its /mindboggling/ dark-sucking capabilities. Lightbulbs aren't even wimps in comparison :-)

What you might do, however, is put

Re:

[Lemmeoutada Collecti]

Well, this is pretty much how ray tracing works, by taking the photons and sucking them into the "light source", basically sucking the dark away from the scene to produce pretty pictures.

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[terrymr]

Everybody knows that the missing matter in the universe is packing peanuts.

Re:

[kestasjk]

I wonder if this is where all that "dark matter" is. Scientist keep talking about how there is so much more matter than what we can detect. Well, we haven't been able to detect this until now. How much more is missing, I wonder.

It amazes me at how much we DON'T know.

Maybe these dark holes are proof of string theory, because they formed from strings that resonate at the same frequency and so they all join together and resonate at a larger amplitude, and this is what makes them seem so massive.

Or maybe you and I aren't astrophysicists and we shouldn't talk about how much "we" don't know, and let the people who know what they're talking about do the theorizing.

I for one...

[tjstork]

Welcome our new 16 solar mass, inside of gigantic super universe is really a giant black hole singularity, with that weird ship from the Disney movie stuck inside, along with the tv game show host and his once she was really hot but now is sorta aging and still has trouble stacking baby blocks especially inside the 1000G black hole overlords.

A giant black hole?

[Anonymous Coward]

They should name it Goatse.

The internet has ruined my mind.

[game kid]

Never mind things like Goatse. Thanks to the internet, the only word in the title that doesn't yet have dirty connotations to me is "theory".

Heck, some are working to change that too [wikipedia.org].

Re:

[Farmer Tim]

the only word in the title that doesn't yet have dirty connotations to me is "theory"

That's because where sex is concerned practice is better than theory. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going off to surf for some ther0y.

Re:

[Nimey]

{looks}

That's more of a giant reddish-pink hole. I don't think there's a theory on that.

sturgeon's law redux

[Speare]

Sturgeon's Law (paraphrased): 90% of everything sucks.

Just goes to show, that when you think it can't suck any worse, you find it can suck a LOT worse.

It must be said

[lazarus]

that "Black holes are outta-sight!"

- Shamefully ripped off from 'Contact' by Carl Sagan

Did we link a start gate to it or is linked to a..

[Joe The Dragon]

Did we link a start gate to it or is linked to a ori super gate?

Residents of companion star get bad rap....

[robinsonne]

It orbits a companion star in the spiral galaxy Messier 33

It's not messy, it's got a lived-in, homey feel to it you insensitive clod!!!

Did we link a stargate to it or is linked to a ori

[Joe The Dragon]

Did we link a stargate to it or is linked to a ori super gate?

Simple solution!

[glwtta]

The extra mass is Dark Mass, right?

After all, that's how we deal with all cosmological phenomena we don't understand - prefix it with "Dark" and you're all set!

Re:

[jamesh]

Your post seems to contain a lot of dark intelligence :)

Re:

[m2943]

The gods don't mind being questioned; it's their priests that get homicidal when you do.

Computer models of Supernovae

[confused_demon]

For this discussion it's worth keeping in mind that current computer models have real problems actually getting supernovae to explode. At one point it was so bad that I heard someone say, "If it weren't for the fact that we occasionally observe one explode, I would assure you that they cannot." It's only been in the last couple of years that someone has made a computer model that actually did it.

Re:Computer models of Supernovae

[Leperous]

"It's only been in the last couple of years that someone has made a computer model that actually did it."

Not true. As a numerical relativitist, I can tell you that no decent 3D simulations of supernovae currently exist.

Half the problem is that the physics is simply unknown - is it sufficient for your model to contain rotation, magnetic fields, and what about the equation of state of the plasma? Neutrinos are also thought to play an incredibly important role in the supernova explosion mechanism, and subsequent nucleosynthesis (and other processes) that go on during the supernova event itself. The other half is the sheer computing power to evolve your equations over decent time scales with enough resolution, not to mention making sure the numerical methods you employ work.

There are plenty of groups who are currently working towards 3D evolutions without any neutrino transport, and I think some people have done neutrinos in 1D. Try checking out some of the work by Leibendorfer [arxiv.org], for example.

A quick run down of the supernova event though, since the article skims over it very lightly: heavy elements gradually build up at the core (nickel and iron especially), and nuclear fusion shuts down due to their high binding energies [wikipedia.org]. As a result, outwards pressure ("thermal support") is lost, and at some critical moment the core will rapidly collapse onto itself (on a timescale of less than a second) as gravity becomes the dominant force. The outer layers will also in-fall onto this collapsing core.

Depending on the mass of the star, we'd expect the core to collapse into some kind of 'proto' neutron star, or straight into a black hole, if it's massive enough. In the case of the former, neutrinos escaping from the cooling central proto neutron star deposit energy into the outer layers, and drive the actual supernova explosion-event. In the case of the latter, I'm not sure that you'd actually see much of a supernova since neutrinos wouldn't be able to escape from a black hole - or at least the explosion mechanism would be different. There is an 'intermediate' option though: a proto neutron star that later on collapses into a black hole, from the still in-falling outer layers. If this happens you'd expect both a black hole, and pretty violent supernova to boot.

I'm not sure about the numbers presented in the article either. Typically, stars above 8 solar masses will collapse and create a supernova and neutron star remnant. Stars over 20 solar masses should form a neutron star which later collapses into a black hole (as is the case here). Stars over 50 solar masses or so will probably just collapse straight into a black hole, with unknown supernova mechanisms.

Re:

[EricWright]

Two of the "someone's" are John Blondin at NCSU and Tony Mezzacappa at Oak Ridge National Labs. Here's a link to a press release [ornl.gov] from ORNL giving a very brief overview of the research project.

Full disclosure: John was my PhD thesis advisor, and I did my research on the evolution of supernova remnants well after the initial explosion. I graduated in the 90s, back when such high-res 3D simulations were merely dreams.

A steller collision?

[tjstork]

This could be a random steller collision. It's gotta be rare, but still an occurance, when two stars collide. In this case, a largish black hole collides with another star, and the star gets incorporated into it.

Trinary System?

[Fractal Dice]

I'm assuming that its out of the question that this binary star/black-hole system was, at one point, a trinary system?

quick fix

[theMerovingian]

computer models of star evolution have difficulty producing black holes more massive than this

Maybe they need to buy more PS3's [slashdot.org]

So much for science!

[__aailob1448]

Well, science has been vainquished, therefore proving the existence of God once and for all.

  But...

ONCE AND FOR ALL!

Re:

[__aailob1448]

t'was a joke using an obscure Futurama reference [transbuddha.com].

hmm

[thatskinnyguy]

One black hole consumes another black hole creating one gigantic gravitational singularity. Case closed.

Re:

[wizardforce]

that could be the case though I wonder what the probability of two seperate black holes getting close enough to merge like that. Even better then that is that this one in particular is part of a multi-star system- what is to say that it didn't siphon off material from another much larger star?

Re:

[jabuzz]

Probably very low. Then again how many odd sized black holes have we observed (it appears to be exactly one), yet we know there are billions of stars in just our galaxy, and that there are billions of galaxies. So even if the probablity of it happening is very low, it still going to happen somewhere and to deny what is being observed is not possibly the outcome of such an event is rather silly. In fact if I where to apply Occams razor I would say that this is the most likely explanation. Until we start find

Re:hmm

[Kingrames]

your black hole theory sucks.

Re:

[thatskinnyguy]

Sometimes the correct and simple explanations are overlooked in favor of more complicated, yet impressive-sounding wrong ones.

x-rays aren't light? Or... wait a sec!

[J_Omega]

From TFA :

Black holes can't be seen, because all matter and light that enters them is trapped. So black holes are detected by noting their gravitational effects on nearby stars or on material that swirls around them.

The companion star of M33 X-7 passes directly in front of the black hole as seen from Earth once every three days, completely eclipsing its X-ray emissions.

OK, I have a basic understanding of the x-rays produced, but seriously, shouldn't the above confuse most lay-people who might read t

Re:x-rays aren't light? Or... wait a sec!

[ceoyoyo]

Black holes don't produce x-rays, but the material falling into them does produce x-rays which, since they're produced outside the black hole, can escape.

Re:

[galt23]

Words like "produce" and "consume" are bad science words. Mostly used in docudrama style tv shows and movies using snippets of science to achieve an end goal: make more money by scaring the crap out of people. Black holes do not EMIT xrays, or anything else that we know of (although they must be emitting something if you believe like Hawking, that black holes can and do lose mass and eventually dissipate) . Xrays are EMITTED by material (gases) falling into a black hole, being heated as they move and ga

Re:

[ceoyoyo]

Care to expand on your objection to the word "produce?"

Or are you just being unnecessarily pedantic?

Re:

[Dragonslicer]

shouldn't the above confuse most lay-people

Why would it? As far as the typical non-scientist is concerned, you can't see X-rays, so they aren't light.

Beautiful Katamari

[Osty]

I blame the King of All Cosmos and his damned tennis racquet. Time to start rolling up all your junk.

Upgrade computer used for models...

[fahrbot-bot]

...computer models of star evolution have difficulty producing black holes more massive than this...

Perhaps they need to upgrade to another OS [slashdot.org] better optimized for modeling black holes... Unless they're saving this for modeling those super-massive ones.

Cue the goatse puns

[GodfatherofSoul]

Just don't link the image please.

Summary...

[Merovign]

"Something we really don't know all that much about turns out somewhat different than we expected."

News at 11? We have a long way to go with cosmology, I just don't get how surprised people seem when we get a surprise.

Hawking's interlude

[Robotron23]

There's no escaping here, I'm gonna beat you out of shape,
like a fucking black hole even light can't escape.
Got the mind to bust a rhyme to make your brain bleed,
other rappers talk shit, but they gotta concede
that I'm a three sandwich eatin', super-model meetin';
step to me punk and you're gonna get a beatin'.

16 Solar Masses?

[c6gunner]

I think we just figured out where Rosie O'Donnell disappeared to...

That'e because...

[s_p_oneil]

Astrophysicists just make stuff up. They have no way to test any theories, no way to watch anything unfold on a cosmic scale, and no way of knowing what may have mangled the light their telescopes see by the time it reaches us. I read a great article on it once written by an astrophysicist who basically said it was the most fun branch of science because you could just make wild and crazy stuff up.

As long as you can cram your square peg theory into the round hole we see through our telescopes, it becomes acc

I noticed the oldnews tag attached...

[mark-t]

... to this story and I couldn't help but agree.

After all, with it being 2.7 million light years away, we certainly know that this story couldn't have been breaking news any later than the end of the last great ice age.

Re:

[Cassius Corodes]

Yes - 1's should always appear after the exclamation mark not in the middle.

Re:

[SpiritGod21]

No, but it's not disproof either.

Re:

[terrymr]

To be continued (only not really)

Did you forget to listen to Hemispheres ?