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Space

A Giant Black Hole Keeps Evading Detecting and Scientists Can't Explain It (space.com) 41

"An enormous black hole keeps slipping through astronomers' nets..." reports Space.com: The big galaxy at the core of the cluster Abell 2261, which lies about 2.7 billion light-years from Earth, should have an even larger central black hole — a light-gobbling monster that weighs as much as 3 billion to 100 billion suns, astronomers estimate from the galaxy's mass. But the exotic object has evaded detection so far. For instance, researchers previously looked for X-rays streaming from the galaxy's center, using data gathered by NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory in 1999 and 2004. X-rays are a potential black-hole signature: As material falls into a black hole's maw, it accelerates and heats up tremendously, emitting lots of high-energy X-ray light. But that hunt turned up nothing.

Now, a new study has conducted an even deeper search for X-rays in the same galaxy, using Chandra observations from 2018... But the Chandra data didn't reveal any significant X-ray sources, either in the galactic core or in big clumps of stars farther afield. So the mystery of the missing supermassive black hole persists.

That mystery could be solved by Hubble's successor — NASA's big, powerful James Webb Space Telescope, which is scheduled to launch in October 2021. If James Webb doesn't spot a black hole in the galaxy's heart or in one of its bigger stellar clumps, "then the best explanation is that the black hole has recoiled well out of the center of the galaxy," NASA officials wrote.

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A Giant Black Hole Keeps Evading Detecting and Scientists Can't Explain It

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  • by ShanghaiBill ( 739463 ) on Monday January 04, 2021 @04:04AM (#60893596)

    the best explanation is that the black hole has recoiled well out of the center of the galaxy

    What could possibly cause a 3-billion-solar-mass blackhole to recoil?

    • Re:Recoil (Score:4, Funny)

      by SeaFox ( 739806 ) on Monday January 04, 2021 @05:05AM (#60893666)

      What could possibly cause a 3-billion-solar-mass blackhole to recoil?

      It was searching for pictures of "hot black holes" online and ended up on Goatse by mistake.

    • A galactical collision.

      As in: An entire other galaxy tugging it to their common center. And if especially unlucky, and even larger black hoe at its center passing by juust close enough to accelerate it into some lonely trajectory.

    • Re:Recoil (Score:4, Informative)

      by Remco_B ( 14435 ) on Monday January 04, 2021 @05:40AM (#60893748)

      the best explanation is that the black hole has recoiled well out of the center of the galaxy

      What could possibly cause a 3-billion-solar-mass blackhole to recoil?

      When two (super massive) black holes collide, and the collision is even slightly off-center, the energy released by the collision can give the resulting black hole a considerable kick. Suppose two black holes of 1.6-billion-solar mass collided, they would convert 112 million solar-mass from mass to energy, according to this collision calculator: https://www.omnicalculator.com... [omnicalculator.com] . That much energy, if not released perfectly symmetrically, can give any object a large kick.

      • Could an object that massive, that makes such a deep hole in the space/time fabric move so much? Would it not be stationary on it's own and it's only movement being the "floating" on the expansion of the universe it self?
        • No matter how big a gravity well is, inertia is still a thing. That much energy being released has to go somewhere, and that almost inevitably will be released as momentum. Let's also remember that while gravity, at the larger (say, Newtonian) scale, is pretty powerful, it is still by far the weakest of all the physical interactions, and the other fundamental interactions can easily overpower it (don't believe me, take a bouncy ball and drop it on the floor, the strong interaction is so many times more powe

    • What could possibly cause a 3-billion-solar-mass blackhole to recoil?

      It swallowed itself.

  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com] It's theoretically possible and makes energy-economics sense.
    • If it is a Dyson Sphere, that would explain the lack of x-rays but does not explain the lack of IR.

      The James Web Space Telescope will have much better infrared resolution than anything currently existing, so we may find out after it launches in October.

      A Dyson Sphere is very unlikely. It would be a K3 civilization, which should be much rarer than K2 civs, yet we have seen ZERO K2s despite scanning over 100,000 galaxies.

      Also, this galaxy is 2.7B LY from the earth. So the K3 civilization would have been est

    • Has somebody watched Isaac Arthur? :D

      Yoi know what I wonder? How does he know all this stuff? I mean not just Sci-Fi theoretize, but that it actually scientifically makes sense? Because what he talks about goes way beyond any specialist's area of expertise, be in a physicist, astronomist, philosopher or whatever.

      No, "futurist" is not an area of expertise. Nor a job. It means "fortune teller". Which means "scam artist".

  • Evading detecting? (Score:3, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 04, 2021 @05:14AM (#60893686)

    Dear lord. Try, "evading detection."

    • Virtual +1 informative. Serious question for EditorDavid: did you ever go to school? Did you really pass your english classes?!

      • The running joke is that the editors are basically morons. It has been that way before Rob "CmdrTaco" Malda sold /. back in 2011.

        They had one job -- to fix spelling / grammar mistakes and don't post duplicates -- and they can't even do that!

        Time to get ready for the weekly Bitcoin propaganda in 3 .. 2 .. 1 .. /s

  • You need to know the correct foot-tapping codes, but once you learn them, black holes galore (according to a friend).
  • That's no black hole...

  • Off course (Score:4, Funny)

    by Errol backfiring ( 1280012 ) on Monday January 04, 2021 @05:51AM (#60893766) Journal
    • Europe:
      Well, off course. It has not given consent for tracking.
    • USA:
      Well, off course. If it is black, evading detection should be its second nature.
  • Hero (Score:2, Offtopic)

    A Giant Black Hole Keeps Evading Detecting

    So it's like Jessica Jones sitting at home being drunk instead of working?

    Or is it evading detection by scientists?

  • by Sique ( 173459 ) on Monday January 04, 2021 @06:17AM (#60893836) Homepage
    Quasars are galaxies, whose Black hole at the center is just gobbling up large amounts of matter, which forms a large aggregation disc, gets accelerated to high speeds, and some of it gets projected out in two large jets along the rotation axis of the Black hole. Quasars are the largest source of X-rays in the Universe we know of.

    Such Black holes are called active cores. The Black hole at the core of our Galaxy is inactive, as it gets feed only small amounts of matter right now, and thus the jets are small and not really visible right now.

    But if there is no material around the Black hole, and the aggregation disk has completely sunk under the event horizon, then there is nothing which can actually radiate to the outside and announce the presence of a Black hole. Maybe this galaxy is totally silent right now, and until new matter has spiraled down to its center and formed a new aggregation disc, we won't detect any radiation from its core.

  • If there is no nearby matter to absorb, black holes are black. It may just have cleared everything nearby. Now, in the middle of a large galaxy, it would seem strange that nothing was near it. Some object or cloud of gas should have a random encounter with something else and be sent the black holes way. But, maybe not.
  • Unless the "Giant Black Hole" is supposed to be doing some kind of detecting function that it's shirking, then " A Giant Black Hole Keeps Evading Detecting and Scientists Can't Explain It" is terrible grammatically.
    I think they meant to say "" A Giant Black Hole Keeps Evading DETECTION and Scientists Can't Explain It"

  • If it evades detection, how do they know it's even there? Is it Schrodinger's black hole? (blah blah blah, something snarky about Uranus).

  • If experiments do not match the theory, then you need to rework the theory.

This is the theory that Jack built. This is the flaw that lay in the theory that Jack built. This is the palpable verbal haze that hid the flaw that lay in...

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