The Milky Way's Black Hole Comes to Light (nytimes.com) 65
Astronomers announced today that they had pierced the veil of darkness and dust at the center of our Milky Way galaxy to capture the first picture of "the gentle giant" dwelling there: A supermassive black hole, a trapdoor in space-time through which the equivalent of 4 million suns have been dispatched to eternity, leaving behind only their gravity and a violently bent space-time. From a report: The image, released in six simultaneous news conferences in Washington, D.C., and around the globe, showed a lumpy doughnut of radio emission framing an empty space as dark and silent as death itself. The new image joins the first ever picture of a black hole, produced in 2019 by the same team, which photographed the monster at the heart of the M87. The new image shows new details of the astrophysical violence and gravitational weirdness holding sway at the center of our placid-looking hive of starlight.
Black holes were an unwelcome consequence of Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity, which attributes gravity to the warping of space and time by matter and energy, much as a mattress sags under a sleeper. Einstein's insight led to a new conception of the cosmos, in which space-time could quiver, bend, rip, expand, swirl and even disappear forever into the maw of a black hole, an entity with gravity so strong that not even light could escape it. Einstein disapproved of this idea, but the universe is now known to be speckled with black holes. Many are the remains of dead stars that collapsed inward on themselves and just kept going. But there seems to be a black hole at the center of nearly every galaxy, ours included, that can be millions or billions of times as massive than our sun. Astronomers still do not understand how these supermassive black holes have grown so big.
Black holes were an unwelcome consequence of Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity, which attributes gravity to the warping of space and time by matter and energy, much as a mattress sags under a sleeper. Einstein's insight led to a new conception of the cosmos, in which space-time could quiver, bend, rip, expand, swirl and even disappear forever into the maw of a black hole, an entity with gravity so strong that not even light could escape it. Einstein disapproved of this idea, but the universe is now known to be speckled with black holes. Many are the remains of dead stars that collapsed inward on themselves and just kept going. But there seems to be a black hole at the center of nearly every galaxy, ours included, that can be millions or billions of times as massive than our sun. Astronomers still do not understand how these supermassive black holes have grown so big.
Supermassive (Score:2)
Astronomers still do not understand how these supermassive black holes have grown so big.
Maybe by gobbling up all the stars and junk at the center of a galaxy? A bit like the way our sun is much bigger than the mass of all the planets?
(shrug)
Re:Supermassive (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
Could there be an explanation that doesn't involve exotic matter or energy? When observation disagrees with prediction, perhaps the model is what needs work, instead of pulling an Einstein and adding a Cosmological Constant to make the observation match the theory.
Of course, I can't disprove the existence of dark matter or dark energy any more than I can disprove the existence of Wilson's Teapot. Further research in this direction is reasonable, and if it produces good predictions, it might prove a viabl
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
There is no way the black hole is 6 times more massive than the galaxy, or that we somehow miscalculated its mass by 6 times.
There are actual numbers attached to these things, not merely "there's some missing mass".
Re: (Score:2)
Wilson's teapot, it is. Too bad, I was rather attached to the Standard Model.
Just to ask - what is dark matter made of. Up, down, charmed, heavy, strange . . . and now dark? Or do quarks just not enter into this?
Re:Supermassive (Score:4, Interesting)
We still don't know exactly what it is, but we know it exists. We've seen galaxies where, thanks to a galactic merger, the dark matter has left the galaxy. The dark matter itself still creates a gravitational lens. And the galaxies act differently without it. There is just so much more evidence for dark matter than "Galaxies are rotating as if there were a lot more matter in them." But we have no idea what it is, or even what type of stuff it might be. Weakly Interacting Massive Particles? Sterile Neutrinos? Primordial black holes? We just don't know.
Re: (Score:2)
You're aware that a third of the particles in the standard model do not interact with the electromagnetic field and are thus "dark", right?
Re: (Score:2)
There other forms of quark matter are so unstable that they have only been observed at the high energies at the LHC. If they exist in natural space, they would have decayed into ordinary matter.
Re: (Score:2)
The question isn't "How does Fat Bastard eat the babies?" It is "How does he catch them in the first place?" Babies carry angular momentum. You need to find some way to deorbit the babies, or they will not get in Fat Bastard's belly, they will just orbit around his massive gravitational field.
Re: (Score:2)
More likely merging with many other supermassive black holes. The Milky Way is surrounded by the remnants of absorbed galaxies.
paywall bypass (Score:5, Informative)
https://archive.ph/Rficz [archive.ph]
Re: (Score:1)
It was a dark and stormy night. The astronomer smirked with grim satisfaction as he looked up from the telescope.
"Nothing. I see nothing. They're all gone."
"Will you name them all, astronomer?" asked the gentle giant, crouched beside the observatory to speak with his friend.
"I only name the stars that I personally kill, as per The Astronomer Code. These stars are lost to the storm, not reaped by my own deadly hand. Still, I take pleasure in their defeat, though they are not mine to name."
The gentle giant st
Re: (Score:3)
Not that there is anything wrong with that!
Can we get a less dramatic description? (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
In this case, a paywall in front of a picture of a Spaghetti-O.
Re: (Score:2)
Is it asking for a credit card that gee golly honest won't be charged, just to confirm I'm 18?
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah, I agree. When the language makes things like a black hole sound ominous or every time Venus is brought up its referred to as "hellish" or some other nonsense, it does science a disservice.
To the less educated they don't understand the science, but that know what fictional stories sound like, and the language being used is very reminiscent of just that: fiction. They read these, assume that these scientists are doing more work in their imagination than the lab, and slowly the credibility of science a
Re: (Score:2)
I don't even want to click on the links in the summary. I'm afraid of where they will lead.
Don't worry. Although these links do indeed lead to a picture of a huge black (or rather, reddish orange) hole, it's fortunately missing those dreadful hands left and right of the hole. And moreover, there are no "apples and twig" dangling down from the hole.
Not just dramatic but wrong (Score:2)
If you look at black holes in the cores of spiral galaxies GENTLE is not the word that comes to mind, and there isn't much evidence that ours is any different YET.
So at best this is wishful thinking.
Re: (Score:1)
> I'm afraid of where [the links] lead.
to the internet, the biggest black hole ever.
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Covid lockdown (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Supermassive Black Hole Response: "I'm on Keto now that pic is thousands of years old, stop fat-shaming me!"
Almost Eternity (Score:5, Interesting)
A supermassive black hole, a trapdoor in space-time through which the equivalent of 4 million suns have been dispatched to eternity
Not quite, but almost. Black Holes evaporate through Hawking Radiation but the larger they are the longer this process takes. Supermassive Black Holes will probably be the last things left in the Universe but even these will eventually evaporate away returning their mass if the Universe lasts long enough to let this happen.
Re:Almost Eternity (Score:4, Interesting)
We don't know if Hawking Radiation exists, it comes from a hybrid theory of GR and QM, two theories we can't reconcile. HR causes a violation of QM information theory. HR has never been observed, too little of it would come from stellar sized black holes.
Without a theory of quantum gravity we can't be sure about a lot of things including HR, singularities, what's really inside the event horizon.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
some theories claim a micro black hole could be possible in TeV range collider. Would be a hoot if only thermal (contains info) rather than Hawking radiation released during decay, the QM information paradox would be solved.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:1)
Will the Big Rip happen before the largest black holes evaporate, or is it that BR can't happen until all the matter is dissipated?
(I need to know because I invested in ForeverCoin.)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
As far as i understand it the Hawking radiation is produced at the event horizon and not at the singularity.
What apparently happens is that when (virtual?) particles spawn in pairs (as they do) near the horizon there is a chance that one of the particles will fly inward and one will fly outward and escape the gravitational field. The outward flying one will be observed as Hawking radiation.
Isn't that the theory though (Score:2)
I thought one of the theories of spiral galaxies [sciencefocus.com] was that there was a supermassive black hole at their centers? I would think JWST would be a good candidate to prove that out.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
There is no formal theory of galaxy formation. The quoted article just correlates the observations that most massive galaxies happen to have a massive central black hole. On the other hand observations of smaller galaxies, like the Magellanic Clouds, do not reveal such central black holes. These correlations should rather hint that galaxies (most of which are small) can form without primordial black holes, and that these black holes rather result from a slow accretion of stellar mass black holes, stars
The person who understands you the most (Score:2)
Imagine being a universe, and Albert fucking Einstein, of all people, disapproves of you.
Re: (Score:2)
Einstein was a genius. Not the best human being that ever walked the planet. I could handle his disapproval. He was a genius, but he didn't know then what we know now. Long as he lets me stand on his shoulders, I don't care if he approves or not.
Besides, he's dead. Ten to one he's in heaven - but five bucks says he ain't!
Intuitively correct (Score:2)
Black Holes at the centre of all galaxies seems, to me, to be intuitively correct. It makes perfect sense to me. There's a direct line from my feeble layman's understanding of gravity to their presence. I love it when a concept simply makes me think, "Yeah. That's all sorts of right."
I'm not for a second saying I could have intuited it myself... but now that somebody else made the leap...
Re: (Score:2)
Yes, much like "The Sun will rise in the East tomorrow morning." Well, I can prove that one now, so it's an imperfect example. It should be good enough to support the following advice:
You can let inductive logic guide your thinking. Don't let it guide your conclusions.
a great visualization (Score:5, Interesting)
This zoom-in gives a good sense of how enormous everything is relative to the very big black hole.
https://arstechnica.com/scienc... [arstechnica.com]
Re: (Score:2)
Mod parent +1 informative.
Thanks for the link! That's a great video.
Wormhole (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Two said it was. Two out of the entire community.
"Unwelcome"? (Score:2)
That's a bizarre summation. From my limited understanding fed by only books and the occasional documentary, black holes seem to be fundamental to the structure of the universe, and key to the reason why we're all here at all. I hate sloppy writing like that. You don't need extra adjectives that tack on an empty narrative.
Look at how much better the sentence is:
"Black holes were a [ ] consequence of Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity"
Re: (Score:2)
Please welcome a black hole near you (Score:3)
Black holes were an unwelcome consequence of Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity, ...
Could someone explain WTF this statement is supposed to mean? "Unwelcome" by just whom exactly? And why?
It makes it sound like black holes wrecked someone's vacation plans or something.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
They introduce infinities into the math, and infinities do *stupid* things to math. In terms of mathematical elegance, black holes aint that.
Although arguably the. beautiful simplicity of the no hair theorem does add a bit of classiness back into the sums.
Re: (Score:2)
Unwelcome by Einstein. Infinities in a mathematical theory indicate that it's incomplete, or wrong. The black hole solutions to General Relativity imply that there is a point of infinite density in a black hole.
Everybody hates black holes. They're rule-breakers (Score:2)
MASS: a few hundred trillion metric tons
DIMENSIONS: 0 x 0 x 0 (English or metric units okay)
VOLUME: 0 cubic whatevers
DENSITY:
Divide by zero error. Universe halted.
Re: (Score:2)
"Re-entry attempt has FAILED."
Re: (Score:2)
Only true in GR. If quantum loop gravity or any granular space theory is correct, dimensions aren't zero.
This is an "image", not a "picture" or a "photo" (Score:3, Informative)
These images are the result of an image reconstruction process from radio interferometric data. These images are not "pictures", and this only makes what they are doing even more fascinating.
For the earlier image they produced, of M87, they used CHIRP (Continuous High-resolution Image Reconstruction using Patch priors; see https://arxiv.org/pdf/1512.014... [arxiv.org]), which I guess was used again for the Milky Way black hole.
Why do you keep posting links to paywalled content (Score:2)
When you can get it straight from the source for free?
https://eventhorizontelescope.... [eventhoriz...escope.org]
-1 for referencing ONLY a paywalled article. (Score:2)
Thanks, not only did I do the usual /. ritual of posting before reading, I can't read the article. I would have clicked [-] on this in the Firehose feed if I'd been around to see it, due to this fact.