Black Holes May Mature Early In Galaxy Evolution 63
masterwit writes "From Scientific American: 'An accidental find in a star-forming dwarf galaxy shows that black holes may mature early in galaxy evolution.' Also, 'if giant black holes in star-forming dwarf galaxies prove to be common — that is, if Henize 2-10 is not an outlier but a representative of a larger population — they may have much to tell about the formation of primordial black holes and galaxies in the early universe.'"
Common Knowledge (Score:5, Funny)
I think any red-blooded male can confirm that this is obvious common knowledge. They keep maturing earlier and earlier. Hell, have you seen them lately? You think they're all 18 or even 22 millennia until that awkward moment when you make your move and find out they're really only 15 millenia. I say it's the chemicals they're subjected to in the modern cosmos.
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Wait, what are we talking about?
Re:Common Knowledge: referential problem (Score:1)
They keep maturing earlier and earlier.
Actually, you are getting older and older...
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"That's what I like about them high school girls man. I get older.. they stay the same age... Yes they do."
- Dazed and Confused
That's disgusting. (Score:2)
Re:I have heard about black holes and their threat (Score:4, Interesting)
This likely will not affect us in any immediate fashion outside our continued pursuit of knowledge of the universe... but on another note:
Barbie dress up games
Looks like you need to clean up your computer and online browsing settings! (Unless you meant to post that link following your comment)
[OT] Spam factories (Score:5, Interesting)
Barbie dress up games
Looks like you need to clean up your computer and online browsing settings! (Unless you meant to post that link following your comment)
That was probably one of the manual-labor spam factories that seem to be sprouting like weeds recently -- they pay people to register on a forum, read the forum, and post comments (with spam links, of course) that make just enough sense to attract real readers' attention.
On the one hand, I guess it means that spam-detecting tech has advanced far enough that it's no longer very profitable to send out machine-generated spam. On the other hand, this makes it harder for us humans to tell the difference. (But then again, xkcd [xkcd.com] has a point too.)
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Would explain the broken English and then the immediate link...as for the xkcd, I remember that one :)
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They also probably buy subscription to these websites and forums...
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Hell, that wouldn't surprise me either. All for a pagerank. I blame Google (among many other things).
what do you mean "if?" (Score:5, Interesting)
The first time astronomers found a supermassive blackhole at the center of a galaxy they decided to check the results against a typical quiet galaxy and found the same thing. The observations continued and it became clear pretty quickly that blackholes in galaxies were common. So common in fact, that I am unaware of a galaxy that didn't have one. The mass of the supermassive blackhole strongly correlates with the mass of the galaxy. A typical galaxy is about 200 times the mass of its supermassive blackhole which suggests a link between supermassive blackhole formation and the creation of galaxies. Whether they act as seeds for a galaxy to form in the first place or are the inevitable result isn't yet clear.
So are galaxies just black hole accretion disks? (Score:2, Interesting)
n/t
Re:So are galaxies just black hole accretion disks (Score:5, Funny)
No. Galaxies aren't just black hole accretion disks.
The influence of the black hole is strong only at the very center tiny fraction of a percent (by either volume or mass) of the galaxy. So much so that we only found them a few decades ago.
You may as well ask if the solar system were just your own personal accretion disk.
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Well, keep in mind, we still can't fully explain galactic rotation curves with GR. It's entirely possible that supermassive black holes have more influence on the galaxy than current theories give them credit for. This is the stuff science is made of!
Well um no. That isn't what's observed. What's observed is the very nearest stars whipping around the supermassive black hole at blistering speeds and no discernable influence further out. Dark matter and galactic rotation curves just don't come into it. Unless your particular brand of MOND is so loopy that things get weaker then stronger again some how. It's just not what we're seeing.
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I'll point out that humans thought the solar system WAS our own personal accretion disk until only the last few hundred years. For the lulz.
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I'll point out that humans thought the universe WAS our own personal accretion disk until only the last few hundred years. For the lulz.
FIFY.
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The influence of the black hole is strong only at the very center tiny fraction of a percent (by either volume or mass) of the galaxy.
In other words, the black hole has direct influence over a small fraction of the galaxy.
You may as well ask if the solar system were just your own personal accretion disk.
Are you sure it's not like asking the soldiers on the battlefield if they report the the Field Marshall?
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The influence of the black hole is strong only at the very center tiny fraction of a percent (by either volume or mass) of the galaxy.
In other words, the black hole has direct influence over a small fraction of the galaxy.
You may as well ask if the solar system were just your own personal accretion disk.
Are you sure it's not like asking the soldiers on the battlefield if they report the the Field Marshall?
You're missing the point entirely. Influence decreases as the square of the distance. There is no cascade effect here. In this case the field marshal and the soliders are 10000 light years apart.
Re:what do you mean "if?" (Score:5, Interesting)
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Also - there could be a common cause for both galaxy and black hole - one need not cause the other.
Perhaps for some reason dark matter is not evenly distributed in space, and that causes normal matter to coalesce in some regions. At the very center of the coalescence this is sufficient to form a black hole, and everywhere else a galaxy forms. So, then both the black hole and the galaxy are just the effects of a prior cause.
Some of the string theory scenarios suggest that gravity could traverse between uni
thanks for the heads up (Score:3, Funny)
Something to keep in mind next time the Intergalactic Real Estate agent tweets about "PRISTINE oceanfront property in young galaxy, fun neighborhood!"
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Damn goatse trolls are getting high tech!
URL
http://tinyurl.com/33t2lpc [tinyurl.com]
Effective URL
http://goatse.fr/ [goatse.fr]
Redirections
1.http://tinyurl.com/33t2lpc
2.http://ow.ly/3yjew
3.http://bit.ly/eBHZpv
4.http://ow.ly/3yj9k
5.http://goatse.fr
dark matter gets murkier? (Score:2)
Re:dark matter gets murkier? (Score:5, Informative)
Black holes are not nearly enough to account for the missing mass from dark matter. Remember dark matter isn't a missing small percentage of what we can see, it makes up 4 times more matter then what can be observed.
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The black hole at the center of our galaxy is four million solar masses. In comparison, the dark matter halo of our galaxy is on the order of a trillion solar masses.
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Yes, and every one of those 2E11 galaxies has 1E6 too little mass even allowing for a big black hole in each one.
Based on other posts here the black hole in a galaxy is about 0.5% of its mass. The discrepancy with dark matter is something like 200% or some crazy figure like that.
Maybe if there are thousands of supermassive black holes floating around in the halos of every galaxy that haven't been discovered yet this would explain the paradox, but there is no evidence for this, and I'd think that something
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Plus, a black hole doesn't have a greater mass than the sun it spawned from (quite the contrary, as it would appear some mass is lost during the "conversion"). It's just a whole lot denser (same mass but lesser size == greater density).
Re:black holes don't exist (Score:5, Interesting)
Science is about forming a testable hypothesis, testing it, and looking at the data. If your hypothesis was wrong, admit it and move on to the next thing. Infinite densities are only forbidden in the sense that they don't fit nicely in the models framework, but that doesn't necessarily mean that the model should be shelved. What you are suggesting is throwing away the experimentalists evidence for black holes because it doesn't fit perfectly with our contrived explanations. You're doing it wrong.
Since relativity and bending of light due to space-time curvature has been experimentally confirmed, meaning light's path can be 'changed' in the sense that we view it (it turns out that the light never really 'curves', but instead it follows a straight line in a curved space, but its all relative, right?), what would you call an area of mass so dense in which light could not escape [wikipedia.org]?
Re:black holes don't exist (Score:5, Interesting)
"Infinite densities are only forbidden in the sense that they don't fit nicely in the models framework, but that doesn't necessarily mean that the model should be shelved."
More to the point, one shouldn't mistake the mathematics for the physics. Just because a mathematical model indicates infinite density does in no way imply it need exist physically. For that to happen, the mathematics would have to completely describe the physical situation. It might, but we cannot ever know that. All we can do is claim consistency up to a certain epsilon of measurement.
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More to the point, one shouldn't mistake the mathematics for the physics.
OTOH, one should remember that any consistent description of the physics is inherently mathematical. And if you get close enough in your mathematical description, you're going to be accurately describing physical phenomena.
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Physics is inherently mathematical. The Phenomenon is only accurately described by physics if two things happen.
1. The phenomenon can be completely treated as subject to physics (Prove that, if you can - prove that formal science can answer all questions about the phenomenon, in advance of actually finding those answers). 2. Someone coined the right math. A fundamentally wrong theory could generate solutions that look closer to accurately describing a phenomenon than a prior theory, but stlll not be the rig
Your arrow example (Score:2)
So Dark (Middle?) Ages tapestries are illustrating Cartoon Physics?
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Agreed. There is no known mechanism for supporting a mass of finite density that is so high from collapsing into a singularity, but that doesn't mean that such a mechanism doesn't exist. Clearly the central areas of a black hole fall into masses and volumes that are not adequately explained by our current theories - we probably need quantum gravity for this. For all we know space/mass/etc are quantized and a black hole just turns into some kind of crystal with as much packed into the smallest volume phys
Re:black holes don't exist (Score:5, Interesting)
And I recommend you actually deal with what the majority of cosmologists and physicists actually talk about. I know you probably think yourself quite hip by accepting a contrary view, and doubtless contrary views are important, but being contrary just so you can feel yourself superior is the sign of stupidity.
We have a theory that predicts what we ought to detect from a black hole. We have multiple cosmological sources that match that description. Alternative explanations have other serious issues, so, the weight of the evidence is towards the existence of black hole. Beyond that, Einsteinian physics, being classical in nature, will naturally have a number of singularities, which is why we seek to unite classical physics with quantum mechanics, and not simply declare that at every point that classical physics fails that that amounts to "that's impossible!"
This idea of yours that physics is proscriptive, as opposed to descriptive, suggests to me that you are pretty much a scientific illiterate.
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but being contrary just so you can feel yourself superior is the sign of stupidity
NUH-UH!
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being contrary just so you can feel yourself superior is the sign of stupidity.
I beg to diff-
Uhm, never mind.
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I found the website hilarious and evidence that MightyMartian's post should be modded +5 insightful. Funny stuff.
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there is no observational evidence for a black hole occuring in nature.
Actually we observe stars near the center of our galaxy moving at high speed in small orbits. We can calculate the mass and maximum size of whatever it is that they're orbiting, and it sure comes out sounding like a supermassive black hole.
You're welcome to offer an alternative explanation.
...that the point mass singularity...
I'm as ignorant on this topic as you are, but I suspect that when we finally unify gravity with the other forces we'll see that the collapse isn't total... Pauli Exclusion Principle, kind of thing.
And there are other no
Wasn't this obvious? (Score:1)
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No.
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Black Holes and Dark Energy (Score:1)
Chicken or Egg, any one?
What? (Score:1)
What?
I thought this was the expected result.
Throw a bunch of matter about, and gravity will make quick work of it. The areas of slightly higher concentration will quickly converge. Only the bits that are relatively balanced between several large points of gravity will avoid assimilation for a while.
Essentially, given a nearly uniform distribution of matter, the more massive an object is, the older it tends to be.
It makes sense that black holes, as a class of objects, tend to be older than stars, planetoid
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Common knowledge? Have you personally seen one - not that "seeing" would even be possible? When an infinity appears in physics equations, the reason is always that we reached the limits of their applicability. We certainly know that there is a whole lot of stuff in small space. It's arrogant to claim we know all the details of it's condition.