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Ultramassive black hole around 33 billion times the mass of the sun discovered by UK astronomers


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Researchers from Durham University discover the black hole by using a phenomenon known as gravitational lensing, where they convert a nearby galaxy into a giant magnifying glass.

 

The team described its findings, published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, as "extremely exciting".

 

Lead author Dr James Nightingale, of the Department of Physics at Durham University, said: "this particular black hole, which is roughly 30 billion times the mass of our sun, is one of the biggest ever detected and on the upper limit of how large we believe black holes can theoretically become, so it is an extremely exciting discovery."

 

https://news.sky.com/story/ultramassive-black-hole-around-33-billion-times-the-mass-of-the-sun-discovered-by-uk-astronomers-12844649

 

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2 hours ago, ballpoint said:

A recent paper postulates that the dark energy of the universe comes from massive black holes like this.  The larger the black hole, the bigger its vacuum energy - the energy of open space, where particles continually pop in and out of existence.  As a black hole grows, its vacuum energy increases, so, by the law of conservation of energy, it must give off negative energy to compensate.  There are detractors of this theory, but the paper shows that the abundance of these black holes would produce a combined negative energy that neatly fits with the amount of dark energy thought to exist.  If the theory is true then, although black holes locally suck, they universally blow, causing the expansion of the universe.

 

Dark energy from supermassive black holes? Physicists spar over radical idea | Science | AAAS

I admit I'm no scientist but IMO black holes connect to another dimension and eventually suck all the matter from this universe  into that dimension where it is compressed into a small very dense sphere which eventually causes another big bang to create another universe, rinse and repeat ad infinitum.

 

If the theory that this universe continues to expand forever, it will do so with a lot of dead suns and planets, once all the suns' fuel runs out.

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2 hours ago, KhunBENQ said:

As a child I was much interested in astronomy.

Should I have gone this way?

I could predict that the sun will explode in x billion years and no one can hold me responsible ????

As I understand it, in x billion years the sun runs out of fuel and while dying it expands to consume all the planets in the solar system.

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11 minutes ago, Bangkok Barry said:

When I was a kid I asked my mother what is beyond space, and she told me to not ask stupid questions. So I'm still wondering. It must end somewhere, even if we can't imagine how distant that somewhere is.

Recycling its the nature of IT

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38 minutes ago, thaibeachlovers said:

As I understand it, in x billion years the sun runs out of fuel and while dying it expands to consume all the planets in the solar system.

Yes the red giant will eat us all.

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8 minutes ago, RichardColeman said:

I like the idea i heard a while back that if aliens exist, we should be looking near black holes for their energy harnessing machinery ! 

The idea of extracting energy from black holes was postulated by Sir Roger Penrose in the early 70s. The idea is to extract energy that the black hole would lose in its angular momentum. It's a very fascinating thought experiment.

 

I don't think though that it's a good idea to seek aliens there because for aliens to attempt to extract energy from black holes they surely first went through a phase development in which they extract energy from stars (e.g. dyson sphere) which should be much easier and should leave some detectable traces. Also if they have such a massive need for energy that they need to extract it from black holes it would mean big changes in the angular momentum of black holes which would massively affect the galaxy around it which the alians inhibit. Maybe not the best idea to mess with that one thing that keeps your galaxy stable ????

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40 minutes ago, TKDfella said:

If we try to figure it out using some basic arithmetic then the idea of a singularity of infinite density would mean that sound in that infinite density would travel faster that light.

If you have a singularity then there can't be any speed inside. Speed is distance over time. You can't have distance within a singular point.

 

41 minutes ago, TKDfella said:

'if nothing can escape from a BH from inside the EH then how can DE from a BH affect the rest of the universe?' is one of the objections to this idea.

Obviously black holes have incredible influence on the rest of the universe due to their graviational effects. I could be wrong but I think the idea is more that black holes "compress" space into a dense object which in turn stretches the rest of the space. And from the perspective of someone in the rest of space that could look like space is expanding.

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2 hours ago, TKDfella said:

This massive BH is in the galaxy cluster Abell 1201 and estimated to be about 2.7 billion light years away in the Constellation of Leo. Most of the large BH's are quite active emitting considerable amount of X-rays but this latest find is considered to be not very active. It was found by model simulation of images of the foreground gravitational lensing. For this BH my rough calculation would give a Schwarzschild radius of about 9.7×1013 km...that's big.

There are a lot of hypotheses about what is inside a BH, one of the most recent being about DE. ('if nothing can escape from a BH from inside the EH then how can DE from a BH affect the rest of the universe?' is one of the objections to this idea.) The point is we just don't know. If we try to figure it out using some basic arithmetic then the idea of a singularity of infinite density would mean that sound in that infinite density would travel faster that light. Well, we can't have that, can we! Magnetars are just about as close as a star can get without becoming a BH (a mass of about 1.5 of our Sun but only 20 km in diameter) and are the strongest magnets in the universe so some scientist think that magnetohydro dynamics plays a part inside a BH (along with QM).

heres my guess; (first is easy :))

 

BH = blackhole

DE = Dark energy ?
EH = Event horizon ?
QM = Quantum mechanics ?

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11 hours ago, eisfeld said:

The problem with this theory is that if the matter was removed from this dimension then the black hole would lose mass and would not be able to form a black hole anymore. So in order for the black hole to actually exist, its matter needs to exist in our dimensions. We find the opposite to that theory, they grow when sucking in matter. Plus Hawking famously postulated that they lose mass via Hawking Radiation to the outside slowly over time.

 

Fun fact: no one actually can observe something truly falling into a black hole. You can just see it approaching it and then becoming slower and slower until it freezes as it is about to enter.

 

Also fun fact: the ultramassive black hole described in this article is not the biggest one we've observed. That would be "TON 618" which is roughly 50% bigger still. And that one is approaching the current theorical maximum for the mass of a black hole because as they grow various effects slow down the growth and there has been only so many billion years since the big bang that they can have spent growing.

Thanks for that update, and I stand corrected, but I still think that everything gets sucked into black holes and eventually create another big bang.

I just can't accept that the universe expands forever with a load of dead matter in it.

However, perhaps there are loads of dead universes in the infinite space. It's not like there isn't room in infinity for an infinite number of universes.

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14 hours ago, eisfeld said:

If you have a singularity then there can't be any speed inside. Speed is distance over time. You can't have distance within a singular point.

 

Obviously black holes have incredible influence on the rest of the universe due to their graviational effects. I could be wrong but I think the idea is more that black holes "compress" space into a dense object which in turn stretches the rest of the space. And from the perspective of someone in the rest of space that could look like space is expanding.

A) Agreed. I was thinking about the very early ideas on what might be (eg. Oppenheimer 1939, collapse would result in in gravitational tidal forces so great as to produce a point of infinite curvature and density. Oppenheimer didn't continue researching this because of the atomic bomb projects.). However, R. Penrose used an hypothesis of cosmic censorship which would deny such 'naked singularities'. . At r = 0 several hypotheses have been suggested which depend on the parameters of a BH and what coordinate system is used. Another consideration is that of QM where it is suggested that violent QM processes control the outcome. I think it was Wheeler in the early 1960's who stated because of such extreme conditions inside the EH that our (then) known physics and math break down and perhaps the answer would be in terms of quantized gravity. As you probably know today several QG hypotheses are being research but unfortunately the 'graviton' particle has yet to be identified.

B) Geometricdynamics does suggest that 'locally' near a BH space-time is stretched but outside of this 'local' region the effect falls off quickly. The BH being presently discussed (as I mentioned) has a EH that is so large that the gravitational (force) at the limit is much less than of Earth (using the common Newtonian equation without GR correction). This  probably contributes as to.why it is not very 'active'. Another point might be, emphasis on 'might', that any DM outside the 'local' limit might have an influence on any 'stretching'.

Nevertheless, I don't see why any ideas should 'thrown out' because NH are mysterious objects...????

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8 hours ago, thaibeachlovers said:

Thanks for that update, and I stand corrected, but I still think that everything gets sucked into black holes and eventually create another big bang.

I just can't accept that the universe expands forever with a load of dead matter in it.

However, perhaps there are loads of dead universes in the infinite space. It's not like there isn't room in infinity for an infinite number of universes.

Nothing gets sucked into a black hole. It is not like a hoover . 

The gravity in a black hole is such that light cannot escape. However the particles, objects and matter first have to pass into the black hole . 

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7 hours ago, TKDfella said:

The BH being presently discussed (as I mentioned) has a EH that is so large that the gravitational (force) at the limit is much less than of Earth (using the common Newtonian equation without GR correction).

Hm I'm not sure what "limit" you mean but if you are talking about the graviational pull at the EH then every black hole in the universe has the exact same amount of gravity on that sphere pretty much by definition because the event horizon is the point at which gravity is so strong that light can't escape anymore and that is a constant.

 

7 hours ago, TKDfella said:

Nevertheless, I don't see why any ideas should 'thrown out' because NH are mysterious objects...

Indeed, especially about whatever lies inside because as far as we know it's impossible to actually ever find out because no information from inside can be obtained from outside.

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On 3/30/2023 at 1:25 PM, Bangkok Barry said:

When I was a kid I asked my mother what is beyond space, and she told me to not ask stupid questions. So I'm still wondering. It must end somewhere, even if we can't imagine how distant that somewhere is.

 

I think universe is like atoms. There is always a smaller or bigger fish. From time to time I do think that out own universe may just be inside someone's a$$

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14 hours ago, eisfeld said:

Hm I'm not sure what "limit" you mean but if you are talking about the graviational pull at the EH then every black hole in the universe has the exact same amount of gravity on that sphere pretty much by definition because the event horizon is the point at which gravity is so strong that light can't escape anymore and that is a constant.

 

Indeed, especially about whatever lies inside because as far as we know it's impossible to actually ever find out because no information from inside can be obtained from outside.

I do agree that I was ambiguous using the word 'limit'. What I meant was, the radius of a EH depends upon the mass. For example, for our Sun collapsing into a BH (it can't actually) the EH sphere around the central point (where a singularity might be, say) the EH radius would around 2.95 km. The strength of the gravitational force on the surface of the EH sphere would be of the order 1.52×1013 m/s2 or roughly about 1.52×1012 times that of the Earth. For a BH 10 times the mass of the Sun the EH radius would around 29.5 km and surface G about 1.52×1011 times that of the Earth. So the larger the EH radius the less gravity there is at its surface. So for the BH under discussion here the EH radius is 9.7×1010 km (in my earlier comment I wrote 9.7×1013 km...I failed to convert meters to km) and its surface gravity only 47 times that of Earth. (in my earlier comment I said much less than...actually I calculated 0.047 of Earth but again I got the decimal point position wrong. I apologise.) For a BH 100 times the mass of this the figures are 9.7×1012 km and 0.47 Earth g. This is deceptive because one might think that it would be easy to escape. No that is not the case. Once over the EH of such a massive BH a kind 'free fall' takes place and each point further needing much more energy than a moment ago and so a travel curve occurs within the EH until a point is reached which means a 'straight' dive to the centre. (This is unfortunately the simplest scenario because in reality the rotation of a BH would have some effect too.) For a BH much larger than the one discussed one could cross the EH and not notice it (with respect to gravity) but your eventual fate would be the same. (Another consideration is that there could also be an Inner EH depending on the characteristics of the BH.)

As far as information is concerned, this is still a hotly debated issue. Prof Hawkins theorised that BH's would destroy information and a BH would get smaller by thermal radiation (that doesn't carry information). Prof. Suskind said that this was wrong...that information cannot be destroyed is the golden rule of QM. Hence we had a paradox. Recent papers suggest that Prof Hawkins while being right in BH radiation but may be wrong in that it was thermal. They suggest the radiation is quantum mechanical and therefore no loss of information. Various universities will conduct simulations see which is more likely. The story continues....????

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19 hours ago, TKDfella said:

I do agree that I was ambiguous using the word 'limit'. What I meant was, the radius of a EH depends upon the mass. For example, for our Sun collapsing into a BH (it can't actually) the EH sphere around the central point (where a singularity might be, say) the EH radius would around 2.95 km. The strength of the gravitational force on the surface of the EH sphere would be of the order 1.52×1013 m/s2 or roughly about 1.52×1012 times that of the Earth. For a BH 10 times the mass of the Sun the EH radius would around 29.5 km and surface G about 1.52×1011 times that of the Earth. So the larger the EH radius the less gravity there is at its surface. So for the BH under discussion here the EH radius is 9.7×1010 km (in my earlier comment I wrote 9.7×1013 km...I failed to convert meters to km) and its surface gravity only 47 times that of Earth. (in my earlier comment I said much less than...actually I calculated 0.047 of Earth but again I got the decimal point position wrong. I apologise.) For a BH 100 times the mass of this the figures are 9.7×1012 km and 0.47 Earth g. This is deceptive because one might think that it would be easy to escape. No that is not the case. Once over the EH of such a massive BH a kind 'free fall' takes place and each point further needing much more energy than a moment ago and so a travel curve occurs within the EH until a point is reached which means a 'straight' dive to the centre. (This is unfortunately the simplest scenario because in reality the rotation of a BH would have some effect too.) For a BH much larger than the one discussed one could cross the EH and not notice it (with respect to gravity) but your eventual fate would be the same. (Another consideration is that there could also be an Inner EH depending on the characteristics of the BH.)

As far as information is concerned, this is still a hotly debated issue. Prof Hawkins theorised that BH's would destroy information and a BH would get smaller by thermal radiation (that doesn't carry information). Prof. Suskind said that this was wrong...that information cannot be destroyed is the golden rule of QM. Hence we had a paradox. Recent papers suggest that Prof Hawkins while being right in BH radiation but may be wrong in that it was thermal. They suggest the radiation is quantum mechanical and therefore no loss of information. Various universities will conduct simulations see which is more likely. The story continues....????

Any chance you can provide an explanation of that in understandable English?

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21 hours ago, TKDfella said:

I do agree that I was ambiguous using the word 'limit'. What I meant was, the radius of a EH depends upon the mass. For example, for our Sun collapsing into a BH (it can't actually) the EH sphere around the central point (where a singularity might be, say) the EH radius would around 2.95 km. The strength of the gravitational force on the surface of the EH sphere would be of the order 1.52×1013 m/s2 or roughly about 1.52×1012 times that of the Earth. For a BH 10 times the mass of the Sun the EH radius would around 29.5 km and surface G about 1.52×1011 times that of the Earth. So the larger the EH radius the less gravity there is at its surface. So for the BH under discussion here the EH radius is 9.7×1010 km (in my earlier comment I wrote 9.7×1013 km...I failed to convert meters to km) and its surface gravity only 47 times that of Earth. (in my earlier comment I said much less than...actually I calculated 0.047 of Earth but again I got the decimal point position wrong. I apologise.) For a BH 100 times the mass of this the figures are 9.7×1012 km and 0.47 Earth g. This is deceptive because one might think that it would be easy to escape. No that is not the case. Once over the EH of such a massive BH a kind 'free fall' takes place and each point further needing much more energy than a moment ago and so a travel curve occurs within the EH until a point is reached which means a 'straight' dive to the centre. (This is unfortunately the simplest scenario because in reality the rotation of a BH would have some effect too.) For a BH much larger than the one discussed one could cross the EH and not notice it (with respect to gravity) but your eventual fate would be the same. (Another consideration is that there could also be an Inner EH depending on the characteristics of the BH.)

As far as information is concerned, this is still a hotly debated issue. Prof Hawkins theorised that BH's would destroy information and a BH would get smaller by thermal radiation (that doesn't carry information). Prof. Suskind said that this was wrong...that information cannot be destroyed is the golden rule of QM. Hence we had a paradox. Recent papers suggest that Prof Hawkins while being right in BH radiation but may be wrong in that it was thermal. They suggest the radiation is quantum mechanical and therefore no loss of information. Various universities will conduct simulations see which is more likely. The story continues....????

Was it not Prof Susskind part of a team who suggest the Hologram theory. That the information is trapped on the boundary of the EV , but in a disjointed form analogous to an Hologram.

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27 minutes ago, cleopatra2 said:

Was it not Prof Susskind part of a team who suggest the Hologram theory. That the information is trapped on the boundary of the EV , but in a disjointed form analogous to an Hologram.

The latest published theory from the last collaboration between Stephen Hawking and Thomas Hertog refines the hologram theory

"Their approach uses the string theory concept of holography, which postulates that the universe is a large and complex hologram: physical reality in certain 3-D spaces can be mathematically reduced to 2-D projections on a surface."

Hawking and Hertog developed a variation of this concept of holography to project out the time dimension in eternal inflation. This enabled them to describe eternal inflation without having to rely on Einstein' theory. In the new theory, eternal inflation is reduced to a timeless state defined on a spatial surface at the beginning of time.

The "eternal inflation theory" therefore updates Hawkings previous theory of "no boundary theory" that the big bang was the start of inflation - the eternal inflation theory would allow for multiverses to be constantly created in a "Darwinian" approach to universe creation which would then solve the issue of why the universe we inhabit is so specifically attuned to supporting life.

The problem with string theory is that it is untestable but in the new Hawking theory there should be some primordial gravitational waves remaining - which probably could not be found by the current instrumentation such as LIGO , but could be found by the satellite-based LISA program or future missions.

 

Besides this the theory the "left-field theory "that most interests me is the one (and I apologise I forget the author) where the total mass and energy of the universe is equivalent to the content of a very large black hole - therefore we are living in a universe contained within a black hole which is why there is a constantly expanding universe (drawing in material from outside the universe) and an "event horizon" which is the limit of where we can see to the end of the universe, and the big bang was in fact the collapse into a black hole creating our universe.

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3 hours ago, thaibeachlovers said:

Any chance you can provide an explanation of that in understandable English?

Ha, I thought I had written simply anyway but I was really replying to a comment about Black Holes (BH) being similar. The simple answer is that they are not and it depends on several factors. Our Sun is not expected to become, eventually. a BH because it doesn't have enough mass. Our Sun will expand to become red giant and then after a billion years or so, will blast away most of the the outer gasses etc. and become a White dwarf, a compact bright object about the size of the Earth. More massive stars, say 10+ times our Sun, will become Super red giants then go super novae, collapse and become a Neutron star*. Here the quantum forces balance the massive gravitational force. However, in such a case finally the quantum forces are not enough, gravity takes over another collapse occurs this time forming a Black Hole. The characteristics of the BH will depend on the former neutron star (mass, rate of spin etc.). The term 'black Hole' is a bit misleading in everyday terms since most of us see a 'hole' as a circular pit on some surface. Potholes in the road for example, you make a hole in a sheet of paper and so on. Astronomical Black Holes are three dimensional 'holes' (spherical) meaning that no matter what direction you approach it you see a black void, a 'hole'. Somewhere inside that darkness all the mass that was the neutron star is now concentrated at the centre point of the dark sphere.(this is not the only possible scenario but it's the simplest one). The gravity around a 10 Sun mass BH will be strong enough to attract any other material that is around and because the 'hole is spinning the attraction will be in form of a disk. Very basically, the point where the material meets the dark surface is called the Event Horizon (EH), and as I said, it is spherical and the size of that dark sphere will depend on the concentrated mass inside. The more mass the bigger the sphere of the EH.

*(Another point is that there is more than one type of Neutron star...i won't go into details...so again, can affect the characteristics of the final outcome.)

I hope this is a 'good enough' explanation...If not I'll try again, Ha???? 

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