The Mystery of the Naked Black Hole (sciencemag.org) 81
sciencehabit writes: Most, if not all, galaxies have supermassive black holes at their centers surrounded by dense clouds of stars. Now, researchers have found one that seems to have lost almost its entire entourage. The team, which reported its find at the annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society, says it doesn't know what stripped the stars away. But it has put forward a tantalizing possibility: The object could be an extremely rare medium-sized black hole, which theorists have predicted but observers have never seen.
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A goatse link! Unexpected.
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Isn't that a white hole, as hopefully it doesn't suck things in, but ejects things.
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You don't know much about how buttsex works, do you?
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I can't say I have ever heard of an anus sucking a dick in on its own.
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FTFY (Score:4, Funny)
The object could be a black hole, which theorists have predicted but observers have never seen.
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Well they went IN and found endless bookcases
So there is a possibility that the phenomenon we know of as black holes are actually IKEA
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Observers have recorded beyond doubt that there are regions of space where vast amounts of matter are packed into a small volume, achieving a density which no other theory than a black hole could explain. That's as good as seeing it.
From most of what I've read, observers have recorded beyond doubt that there are regions of space that show effects (such as high amounts of acceleration) that no other accepted theory than a black hole could explain.
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Those observers haven't seen the way some of these low-budget house moving companies pack stuff up.
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Isn't it obvious? (Score:3, Funny)
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Re:Not an astronomer, obviously (Score:5, Informative)
How do we know the black hole itself didn't strip the stars away? That's kinda what they do, isn't it?
Not really, or at least not anymore than stripping the planets in the solar system away is "kinda what" the sun does. Contrary to the popular image, black holes aren't like giant vacuum cleaners that suck stuff in. Most of them tend to have lots of things in stable orbits around them, as stars have planets, and planets have moons. The only stuff that tends to fall in is stuff that gets directed towards them. A giant black hole at the center of a galaxy would only tend to consume stars which were "thrown" toward it, usually by unstable orbital dynamics created by encounters with other stars.
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sould do, yes - then the remaining orrbiting stuff orbits a little faster.
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Just an idea: After some time of getting "thrown" things at it, its gravital pull sould increase isn't it ?
Yes, though for a supermassive black hole that is already composed of the masses of many stars, adding another one now and then probably won't increase the gravitational pull suddenly or significantly.
All the objects previously in stables orbit should start to feel the pull and their previously stable orbit should start to get messed up (exentric orbits, and then maybe plunging orbits ?).
Yes, when a central mass increases, everything in orbit will "fall toward it" a bit faster. But they will still have their "sideways" orbital velocity, and for a small mass increase (or even a relatively large one), the orbit will just end up going faster and being somewhat smaller.
In general, the changes i
Wow ... (Score:3)
Man, that title sounds like a cross between a Nancy Drew book and some really bad porn.
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Man, that title sounds like a cross between a Nancy Drew book and some really bad porn.
I know, right??
There's no way that one wasn't deliberate. Guess it's effective as click-bait, though, 'cause here we are...
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I was disappointed with Naked Lunch, so I didn't get my hopes too high this time.
confusing title (Score:5, Informative)
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Well, given that most people don't know the term singularity, you can safely assume that they used the word black hole so people would know what they were talking about.
It's the layman's term, but it isn't confusing.
Re: confusing title (Score:2)
That's why a good editor would say:
A naked singularity, or a black hole without surrounding mass, was...
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A "black hole without surrounding mass" is not a "naked singularity". A "naked singularity" is a "black hole without an event horizon". A "naked black hole" is not a technical term, but a physicist would assume that it is a colloquial way of referring to a "naked singularity". The term "naked" never appears in the scientific paper; it's something the journalist made up, and the journalist apparently wasn't aware of the physical use of
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No, a good editor isn't going to put such rubbish into a headline.
This was the headline in both TFS, and TFA.
If every headline (by which we mean the brief title at the beginning of a story (by which we mean an article or essay)) is going to provide the reader (by which we mean the intended audience), with a fully expanded (by which we mean explain in more detail) version of every word used in the headline (see above) to convey more information (by which we mean clarify) ... then not a single article would
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Kewl sig.
Re:confusing title (Score:5, Informative)
You totally missed the person's point. It's not about using the word "black hole" when they should have used the term "singularity" (note: black hole and singularity are not synonyms). It's that a "naked singularity" is a very specific term, and it doesn't mean "a black hole not surrounded by stars" - it means a black hole without an event horizon. This is an important concept in physics because there's a number of situations that seem like they should be able to produce one (such as strongly rotating black holes), but if you had one, relativity would break down near it. The event horizon in a black hole "protects" our universe from the effects of any weirdness inside the hole (such as a singularity, if they actually do exist), but with a naked singularity you have no such "protection". The concept exposes an area of weakness in our current understanding of physics.
Calling a black hole without stars a "naked black hole" would be like calling a jacket made out of a very transparent plastic an "invisibility cloak". It's using words that can be seen to make sense (you can't see it, so it's an invisibility cloak!), but it gives readers the totally wrong impression of what is being discussed.
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No, I didn't miss it, it's a stupid point.
Which would have no meaning to the intended audience.
And is, again, too fine of a distinction for the target audience to shove into the headline.
As opposed to,
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When you get divorced, are you suddenly always called naked?
Naked is entirely not the correct word to use, and is even more inappropriate because a naked singularity is something in physics, and has nothing to do with companions of the black hole.
You totally missed the person's point.
No, I didn't miss it, it's a stupid point.
If you didn't miss the point, why are you arguing against something that wasn't said?
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I'm of the view (that Hawking recently has started promoting) that there's no such thing as either a singularity nor an event horizon, that a black hole is basically just an area of near-frozen time formed during the collapse of the star (everything that falls in basically "freezing" into it relative to an outside observer), and that time basically leaks out as the black hole boils off (and its mass reduces). Aka the collapse is still ongoing and everything is still falling in from our perspective, just inc
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I always suspected that the concept of a singularity was a psychological crutch that made the mathematics easier to visualize for us mere mortals; anything on the other side of an event horizon is undefined, and anything real becoming undefined is psychologically difficult.
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I always suspected that the concept of a singularity was a psychological crutch that made the mathematics easier to visualize for us mere mortals; anything on the other side of an event horizon is undefined, and anything real becoming undefined is psychologically difficult.
It probably gets much more complicated that that. Stars collapse and you've got a neutron star. Eventually, the pressure at the center of the neutron star will equal the energy needed to break down the neutrons into a quark-gluon plasma. Now you've got a question of the transparency of neutron star matter to quark-gluon plasma as the gravitational forces at the center will be zero while the space once occupied by the destroyed neutron is filled and the new neutron in the center is destroyed. I bet somebody
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I'm not referring to either of these arguments by Hawking, which are both very old. I'm referring to his most recent response [arxiv.org] to the firewall paradox from several months ago, which has often been snarkily summed up as "there are no black holes [nature.com]", but can more accurately be summed up as "only apparent horizons exist, not true event horizons, and by implication, not singularities either". All infalling matter, even that which built the black hole itself, is held on the apparent horizon, which is a metastable
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False vacuum decay scenarios are *really* speculative.
*If* such a low-temperature state can be achieved, it's not clear that it'd even be physically meaningful other than having an ultra-massive black hole persisting into the indefinite future. That poses completeness problems for relativistic quantum field theories like the Standard Model, and for related problems like black hole complementarity, but it does not pose non-theoretical problems for the universe (i.e., it would expose that our best tools fo
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Quoting from wiki [wikipedia.org]:
In general relativity, a naked singularity is a gravitational singularity without an event horizon.
Notice there is no linking of "black hole" with "naked singularity". Nor can there be, as one has to have an event horizon, while the other has to not have an event horizon.
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Slashdot is alive and well.
Thanks.
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Well, it seems you at least got confused by it.
Because they actually mean the black hole, without stuff floating around it, thus 'naked', not the singularity.
Ejected Star (Score:2)
Occasionally we have seen stars that have been ejected from their galaxies. This can happen during galaxy mergers.
How do we not know that this is just a massive star that turned into a black hole after it got ejected from its original galaxy? After all massive stars do not last that long because of their size.
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How do we not know that this is just a massive star that turned into a black hole after it got ejected from its original galaxy?
Agreed. If I may add to what you're saying, it's possible an ejected star formed a black hole in a region of space with very little matter around it and then drifted towards the larger black hole; not that the larger black hole stripped matter away from the smaller. There's also plenty of documentation of "rouge" stars drifting in the empty space between galaxies, so it's a reasonable guess that there are also "rouge" black holes too.
To be fair the article does say, "But perhaps it just started out with few
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"rouge" black holes
Are they rouge because of red-shift? Those rogues.
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"rouge" black holes
Are they rouge because of red-shift? Those rogues.
Dammit... I deserve that.... I hate making spelling mistakes. My face is rouge now.
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Now realize that you made that spelling mistake twice in that post.
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Looks like Captain Obvious is trolling Slashdot now
The Mystery of the Naked Black Hole (Score:1)
That would make a good porn title.
Maybe (Score:1)
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The abundance of mass in the center of a galaxy is pretty much the reason that there is a black hole in the center to begin with. It would be odd for all of that mass to have either been hoovered in or stripped away normally. Generally it would be much like a planetary system, most mass makes up the central object, but there's always leftover mass that becomes planets or asteroids, or in the case of this much matter, becomes stars in stable orbit around a central black hole.
Once in established orbits, the
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Clickbait headline (Score:2)
I read the headline, and got very excited thinking that someone had found a naked singularity, it should have been re-worded to say, The Mystery of the Black Hole with Middle aged spread or something. Finding a intermediate sized Black hole is interesting, but not quite as exciting as a naked singularity would have been. To be fair to /. Sciencemag came up with the title, not the editors!
Is the Milky Way black hole naked? (Score:2)
From the synopsis (Score:1)
"The object could be an extremely rare medium-sized black hole",
I like my black holes extra medium please.....
Medium rare (Score:1)
Extremely rare medium sized black holes... are those a bit like extremely rare medium sized Americans?
Not true (Score:1)
It is no naked, there are some gas, that why you can see it en X-rays, but there are less stars. So, its not the black hole, its is something unsual in the stellar dynamics in the surroundings.
A sense of scale (Score:2)
That's right out at the edge of the central bulge (if the galaxy is the same size as the Milky Way.