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Researchers Spot Black Hole Eating Stuff At Over 40x the Theoretical Limit (sciencealert.com) 75

Posted by BeauHD from the would-you-look-at-that dept.
Astronomers have discovered a supermassive black hole in the early Universe devouring matter at over 40 times the Eddington limit. ScienceAlert reports: Led by astronomer Hyewon Suh of Gemini Observatory and NSF's NOIRLab, a team of researchers used JWST to take follow-up observations of a smattering of galaxies identified by the Chandra X-ray Observatory that were bright in X-rays but dim in other wavelengths. When they got to LID-568, they were having trouble identifying its distance across space-time. The galaxy was very faint and very hard to see; but, using the integral field spectrograph on JWST's NIRSpec instrument, the team homed in on the galaxy's exact position. LID-568's far-off location is surprising. Although the object is faint from our position in the Universe, its distance means it must be incredibly intrinsically bright. Detailed observations revealed powerful outflows from the supermassive black hole, a signature of accretion as some of the material is being diverted and blasted into space.

A painstaking analysis of the data revealed that the supermassive black hole is a relatively small one, as supermassive black holes go; just 7.2 million times the mass of the Sun. And the amount of light being produced by the material around the disk was much, much higher than a black hole of this mass should be capable of producing. It suggests an accretion rate some 40 times higher than the Eddington limit. At this rate, the period of super-Eddington accretion should be extremely brief, which means Suh and her team were extremely lucky to catch it in action. And we expect that LID-568 will become a popular observation target for black hole scientists, allowing us a rare glimpse into super-Eddington processes. The research has been published in Nature Astronomy.

Researchers Spot Black Hole Eating Stuff At Over 40x the Theoretical Limit More | Reply

Researchers Spot Black Hole Eating Stuff At Over 40x the Theoretical Limit

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  • I'm not an astrophysicist but I'd have thought that Dark Matter would be the obvious way to allow Black Holes to accrete mass rapidly. There is a lot more of it around that ordinary (baryonic) matter and since it does not interact via electromagnetism then light will not exert any pressure on it and there is nothing to counteract gravity.
    • There is no dark matter

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by 2TecTom ( 311314 )

        there are however dark matters. for instance, just look at classism, it's proof positive some people are black holes

      • There is no dark matter

        You're right. This is merely a fancy term to describe the 95% of something out there we know nothing about.

        Within our (limited) understanding, it’s “matter” of some kind. Until we prove it’s not.

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by Entrope ( 68843 )

          This is merely a fancy term to describe the 95% of something out there we know nothing about.

          Cosmologists think the universe is about 5% ordinary matter, but only 27% dark matter. The rest is dark energy, not dark matter.

        • There is no dark matter

          You're right. This is merely a fancy term to describe the 95% of something out there we know nothing about.

          Within our (limited) understanding, it’s “matter” of some kind. Until we prove it’s not.

          It is really unfortunately named. It is a placeholder for a problem we see, with some parts of the Universe not behaving as predicted.

          My favorite physicist, Sabina Hossenfelder has something to say about the dismal state of astrophysics. She actually swears in it, not her usual approach. https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

          And it is true - we're busy doing the same experiments that have been disproven, and after spending huge amounts of money to confirm the Higgs, the claim is that we have to build an

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Rei ( 128717 )

        Dark matter really isn't that weird. It just requires particles that have mass (for example, via interacting with the Higgs field, or other means, such as axions, which gain mass through QCD) that don't have a lot of other interactions (weak or no electromagnetic interaction, low weak interaction, low self-cross section, stable). There could even be a zoo of particles that do even less than that, e.g. don't even have mass, for all we know. There are alternative possible explanations, but the fact that it'

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by HiThere ( 15173 )

          FWIW, I think that "dark energy" is something that suppresses gravity. This seems to be needed, or the Big Bang would never have happened. The existence of such a thing would imply that black holes can release things a lot more quickly than merely evaporating.
          Now as to what that "something" is...???

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Rei ( 128717 )

      Dark matter is more diffuse than baryonic matter due to its more limited means of interaction and losing energy, so does not seem like a good candidate for rapid growth. Also, what dark matter has to counteract gravity is what everything does: its momentum. It's not going to just suddenly head into a black hole just because one happens to be in the neighborhood; dark matter without an intersecting trajectory, same as baryonic matter, would have to be quite close to be fated to inspiral (there exist stable

  • The Eddington limit is about stars and not about black holes. There is nothing to balance in case of a black hole. Its luminosity depends on the surrounding material, friction and how much is falling into the black hole.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Tx ( 96709 )

      There is nothing to balance in case of a black hole

      Yes, there is. The accretion disk of a growing black hole emits light, and it is the radiation pressure of that light that determines the point at which the black hole eventually stops growing - that radiation pressure reaches a point where it prevents any further matter from getting close enough to the black hole to be accreted. So the Eddington Luminosity absolutely applies to an actively growing black hole.

      • The Eddington limit indeed was formulated for a star in hydrostatic equilibrium. An accretion disk around a black hole has much more complicated mechanics of how matter reaches the black hole and how radiation is emitted from the accretion disk outside the event horizon.

        Accretion disks, whether from supermassive black holes or from the formation of stars through a gravitational collapse of tenuous material in a nebula, exhibit polar outflows, the mechanisms of which are not fully understood but hypothes

  • If you don't learn from the past, you're doomed to (Score:3)

    by Kelxin ( 3417093 ) on Tuesday November 05, 2024 @02:45AM (#64920489)
    I would have figured by now, scientists would have at least learned how much they don't know vs trying to quantify how much they do know. Every time someone says "this is a fact about the universe", 10-20 years later they're proven wrong time and time again.

    • Publish or perish.

      There aren't that many in the field in an absolute sense who are qualified to to do peer review on anything the others publish.

      So lots of stuff gets published. Is accepted as fact. We put up a new telescope or instrument of some sort and are astounded that half of the laws are the universe we made up simply aren't true. Repeat each generation of new scientists.

      You'll see the same happen in other fields. Anthropology told us North America was first conixed from Asia about 7k BC. Then 1

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Kokuyo ( 549451 )

        Given that science these days (and probably at every point in existence of humans) isn't a sacred, 100% dependable source of facts...

        How do I counter flat earthers at this point? Or anti-vaxxers. Being an autist, I am forced to be rather overly precise when using phrases like "we know".

        Yes, I'm pretty sure that the earth is round and I'm pretty sure quite a few of the experiments to prove it are correct. But if they ask me "Can you be one hundred percent certain?" I'll always have to say "Well, no".

        Yes, it

        • But if they ask me "Can you be one hundred percent certain?" I'll always have to say "Well, no".

          Terrible example. We are 100% certain about the shape of the planet. There is ZERO chance of being wrong here. None. It is sort of slightly oval but mostly round.

          We are not 100% certain where detection, observation and reproduction are difficult. Here we rely on multiple, overlapping, data to test the current prevailing hypothesis to abstraction. If we continually fail to disprove - and that is actually the whole point behind the scientific method - the hypothesis then we accept that it is very likely true

        • If you are not 100% is a kind of a sphere, then you are probably indeed an autist.

      • I would not call that "wrong".
        I would call that "refinement"

        If the oldest evidence is 7,500 years old: then it is as that.

        Older evidence has to be discovered first.

        And if it is, it does not make previous one wrong. It is still true. It is just not the oldest anymore.

        • In North American anthropology the old guard has fought tooth n nail when older evidence has been found.

          The dates only got pushed back each time that generation's guardians of truth retired or died.

          The evidence for 35k years has been around for almost 20 years. The official dates is still roughly 17k.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Rei ( 128717 )

            1) Clovis (the one formerly widely thought to be the first peoples) was ~13k, not ~17k.

            2) No claimed site in the ~35k range has significant scientific buy-in. There will always be people making fringe claims - the Cerutti Mastodon site for example. But they have to actually survive scientific rigor and convince others. And the simple fact is that the evidence for them just isn't that good.

            3) General acceptance today is ~16-20k, with some dispute around the periphery (for example, the White Sands footprint

            • There is more to the story as to why claims of people-in-the-Americas-before 13K before present were viewed with a jaundiced eye.

              The date 13K BP wasn't just an arbitrary number that popped out of mass spectrometer examining a splinter of wood found at a dig. The theory is that the Americas were populated by a land migration across what is now the Bering Straights, a migration made possible by low sea levels resulting from the enormous amount of water bound up in the Ice Age northern ice sheet. But this

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by colfer ( 619105 )

              The resistance to change was a bit high in this case it seems. People have jobs, career, etc. As always with Thomas Kuhn arguments on change, it's a matter of degree. Medical science is highly innovative but lead researchers are notoriously hidebound and autocratic and/or overly revered. Look at what happened at Duke, with a lowly postdoc calling out the biostats of a prestigious and promising research group, the lead protected on up to the provost, until finally the NIH imposed a big sanction. https://en.w [wikipedia.org]

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gtall ( 79522 )

      Science rarely "says" anything is fact, their statements are usually if theory A is correct, then B. It is people like you who promote those statements to "Science says B".

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Rei ( 128717 )

      I would have figured by now, scientists would have at least learned how much they don't know vs trying to quantify how much they do know.

      The entire job of theoretical physicists is to create models of the universe that explain as much as possible in as simple of a system as possible, figure out what possible observations could prove or disprove said models, develop and operate the tools to take those observations, and see how well they match the model.

      When something doesn't match some of our best models, th

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by colfer ( 619105 )

        Correct me if I'm wrong, but in classical physics electro-magnetism was always a bit of a problem theoretically, and with some observations here and there. The excellent formulas did work. Newtonian mechanics and gravity seemed more natural by contrast. The surprising thing was that solving the EM situation also involved changing gravity.

  • So it's like the typical American eating a meal?

  • Seriously guys, you are making such a big deal out of nothing, I put on a few winter pounds, just cut me some slack until spring. You guys are the worst! ;_;

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