Astronomers Discover 83 Supermassive Black Holes at the Edge of the Universe (cnet.com) 86
"A team of international astronomers have been hunting for ancient, supermassive black holes -- and they've hit the motherlode, discovering 83 previously unknown quasars," reports CNET:
The Japanese team turned the ultra-powerful "Hyper Suprime-Cam", mounted to the Subaru Telescope in Hawaii, toward the cosmos' darkest corners, surveying the sky over a period of five years. By studying the snapshots, they've been able to pick potential quasar candidates out of the dark. Notably, their method of probing populations of supermassive black holes that are similar in size to the ones we see in today's universe, has given us a window into their origins.
After identifying 83 potential candidates, the team used a suite of international telescopes to confirm their findings. The quasars they've plucked out are from the very early universe, about 13 billion light years away. Practically, that means the researchers are looking into the past, at objects form less than a billion years after the Big Bang. "It is remarkable that such massive dense objects were able to form so soon after the Big Bang," said Michael Strauss, who co-authored the paper, in a press release. Scientists aren't sure how black holes formed in the early universe, so being able to detect them this far back in time provides new avenues of exploration.
After identifying 83 potential candidates, the team used a suite of international telescopes to confirm their findings. The quasars they've plucked out are from the very early universe, about 13 billion light years away. Practically, that means the researchers are looking into the past, at objects form less than a billion years after the Big Bang. "It is remarkable that such massive dense objects were able to form so soon after the Big Bang," said Michael Strauss, who co-authored the paper, in a press release. Scientists aren't sure how black holes formed in the early universe, so being able to detect them this far back in time provides new avenues of exploration.
"Edge of the Universe" (Score:5, Insightful)
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Are you saying it's turtles all the way down?
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Re: "Edge of the Universe" (Score:5, Interesting)
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>> The size of the universe may in fact be infinite.
Not from ANY pov. The universe is expanding, the more spacetime between you and what you are looking at the faster the target is moving away from you - if you look far enough back you get to the point where things are receding at C. Frequency of electromagnetic radiation = 0. Wavelength is infinite. It disappears. You can't see it OR feel its gravity, it is gone, not in "the universe" of things that matter in any way at all. Whatever is beyond
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Yes, my left and right eyes live in different visible universes. My rumination is that if something is beyond visibility/gravitation does it actually exist? And if "everyone" has a different visible universe and there are an infinite number of "everyones" then there is no big bang - it seems. Look at galaxy A which is close to the edge of visibility. People in galaxy A can look "further back in time" by looking at galaxy B which is beyond our visibility & B looks at C. No real edge, an "infinite"
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The size of the universe may in fact be infinite.
Perhaps, but working with infinities really sucks, and the math to do so is a big poopy head.
I'm personally not on speaking terms with infinity, and will loudly disdain its existence.
Besides, what is infinity going to do about it? If information can't reach us from beyond our observable universe, it's not going to be able to yell at me or smack me about the head for insulting it!
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Darn! I you got here first.
I always get a kick out of astronomers (or perhaps it's the way the MSM reports it) referencing the edge of the universe, as if they know where the boundaries are.
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Photons vs time (Score:2)
From the photon point of view, there is no time, all path are instantaneous, short (human size) or astronomical (accross the observable universe), for the photon it ages exactly a perfectly zero seconds.
I accept this as apparently factual. What I'm having trouble wrapping my brain around is the relationship between the statement above and how photons travel through spacetime if they do not experience time. Speed = distance / time and photons have the constant speed = c. But if time for them = 0 then that fundamental mathematical relationship breaks down and is undefined. (cannot divide by zero but we are essentially saying c=dist/0) My confusion is, how does a photon travel a distance through spacetim
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Photons only travel at c in a perfect vacuum and since the universe is not a perfect vacuum, a short amount of time does pass in the photons frame of reference.
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I just can't wrap my head around the idea of a photon lingering about and imparting its energy back on Earth TODAY.
Photons don't have to linger - they travel at c and thus don't experience time like we do.
From the photon's reference frame its creation and destruction are instantaneous events. It's just hard to see that in 'Flatland'. Imagine mapping the two photon interactions into a single event from its perspective - like flipping entangled particles just being the projection of a single 5D object into
Universe expanding (Score:5, Informative)
Light scatters in all directions (for the most part) from the origin of a single point of event.
No, a photon will travel in a straight line from it's point of origin unless acted upon by an outside force. You are describing what happens to the innumerable photons that are emitted from a typical light source which is not the same thing. The photons that we see from these distant sources have traveled a long distance in a straight line (*) to get to us.
(* straight in this context is not the same Euclidean geometry straight line you might have learned about in high school)
So if it happened 13 billions year ago, how is it still observable?
Because the universe expanded [wikipedia.org] faster than the speed of light. Space itself is expanding to this day and so some light that was emitted a long time ago is just now reaching us. Some light that was emitted a long time ago will never reach us because it's too far away and space is expanding too fast for it to ever get to us.
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Time was, people had grave difficulties with theology of God-as-deceiver, described in the question of did Adam and Eve have belly buttons.
If so, it indicated a past that never actually happened. If not, then they weren't in the image of God, of which Man in general is.
Modern theology that tries to get around the vast size of the universe by suggesting God created space witb light from stars already 99.999% of the way here, suffers the same problem.
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Photon position (Score:2)
A photon as a particle will travel in a straight line as you classically think, however it is also a wave and has uncertainty according to Heisenberg uncertainty.
This is true but not relevant to this particular discussion. A photon from Betelgeuse does not diffuse to both Alpha Centauri and our Sun in any practical sense. It's not a useful exercise to treat the uncertainty in the position of a photon in units of light years. Remember we are talking about photons we've actually observed through our eyes or through out measuring equipment.
If you constrain the photons position, say by emitting it from a point and passing it through an arbitrarily small orifice, cementing position, momentum blows up and spreads it out.
It doesn't spread out to distances measured in light years. And we are constraining the photon's position because we have obser
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This is true but not relevant to this particular discussion. A photon from Betelgeuse does not diffuse to both Alpha Centauri and our Sun in any practical sense. It's not a useful exercise to treat the uncertainty in the position of a photon in units of light years. Remember we are talking about photons we've actually observed through our eyes or through out measuring equipment.
It doesn't spread out to distances measured in light years. And we are constraining the photon's position because we have observed it.
It's quite useful because it's possible and in many cases the most likely scenario. The distance of diffraction is dependent on the distance of observation from the constraint of position because it effectively "alters the course" of the photon by an angle as this page outlines [gsu.edu]. So it's quite possible a single photon can be emitted from from a point, pass through a tiny aperture, and diffract to either earth or alpha Centauri even though neither lines up with the point and aperture opening - you won't kn
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I think they mean, edge of the observable universe.
It's not so simple, as the light has limited speed anything we see is from the past, so there's a limit we can see even though the Universe might be infinite in size, because it's not infinite in time - the ultimate observable edge is the CMB (Cosmic Mircrowave Background radiation [wikipedia.org]), we cannot see anything beyond because the Universe was opaque before.
So there's a point in saying "at the edge of the Universe", it means at the very early beginning, which in this case (this survey results) is very significan
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I think they mean, edge of the observable universe.
Isn't that edge the Cosmic microwave background [wikipedia.org] ?
And wouldn't "near the beginning" of the universe be a better way to describe it than "edge"?
Holly (Score:4, Funny)
It's always the way, innit? You hang around for three million years in deep space and there hasn't been one, then all of a sudden eighty three turn up at once.
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You are to smart for this universe, go hide somewhere.
You are right, it is probably a glitch in the matrix.
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Well, the thing about a black hole - its main distinguishing feature - is it's black. And the thing about space, the colour of space, your basic space colour, is black. So how are you supposed to see them?
-- Holly, Marooned
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Ah the old brilliant line of "I'm dumb, therefore no-one else can know anything".
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Doctors often engage in "I went to school, therefore no one else can know anything".
BTW what's with that hyphen??
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These are not mutually exclusive ideas, and your point is irrelevant.
The hypen is correct in British English, which is my native language. It also disambiguates between a singular entity (e.g. "There are four men in a room. No one can lift the boulder.") a mass ("No-one knows how many piano tuners there are in Europe.")
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replying to myself -
No, because these object are closer than the cosmic radiation background, so are in fact "inside our sphere".
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replying to myself -
No, because these object are closer than the cosmic radiation background, so are in fact "inside our sphere".
But if they're on the edges, perhaps they are the "doors" to the other universes. Kind of like the doors to other holiday lands in the forest in Nightmare Before Christmas
Daft question... (Score:2)
If these (and millions more) are hard to see, and have large amounts of gravity, could it be that they're what's causing the universe to expand quicker than expected?
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One nice thing (Score:4)
"Scientists aren't sure how black holes formed in the early universe, so being able to detect them this far back in time provides new avenues of exploration."
A nice departure from the hyperbolic "Scientists are shocked to find...." or "Scientists scramble to find answers when the laws of physics are turned on their head!" sort of wording.
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Black hole evaporation is extremely slow via Hawking radiation. It's less on the order of billions of years and more on the order 1 followed by a billion zeros. Gravitational interactions don't preference older or younger objects, more denser and heavier objects are drawn inward as momentum is transferred to the lighter mass object.
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There is no convincing evidence that you exist, either.
How it happened. (Score:1)
Early blackhole formation (Score:1)
If energy coalesced into enough matter that was close enough to other matter, wouldn't that be enough g to create a mass that collapses on itself?
Shouldn't need a supernova to do that, right?
"83 Supermassive Black Holes" (Score:4, Funny)
And one restaurant.
Speaking of tongue's two uses... (Score:1)
Much like the average slashdotter.
Much like the distance from the average slashdotter to a vagina.
Disappointed (Score:2)
Seventy comments and no one has thought to post this? What's happened to Slashdot?
https://youtu.be/N-_mHedypEU [youtu.be]