E-mail updates
Follow on Twitter
Subscribe to RSS
Lynette Cook / Gemini Observatory / AURA
An artist's concept of what a future telescope might see in looking at the black hole at the heart of the galaxy M87. Clumpy gas swirls around the black hole in an accretion disk, feeding the central beast. The black area at center is the black hole itself, defined by the event horizon, beyond which nothing can escape.
Astronomers say they've come up with the definitive estimate for the mass and size of the biggest black hole in our celestial neighborhood, using a method that can now be applied to even bigger monsters beyond.
It's long been known that the supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy M87 was a big one, but over the years, there's been some debate over just how big it was. Some of the estimates have ranged down toward a mass equivalent to 3 billion suns. In 2009, however, Karl Gebhardt of the University of Texas' McDonald Observatory took a fresh look at old data and came up with an estimate of 6.4 billion suns.
"That had a large uncertainty," Gebhardt told me. Today, Gebhardt and his colleagues announced a new estimate that's based on high-accuracy observations from the Gemini Observatory in Hawaii as well as the McDonald Observatory. The bottom line: M87's black hole is equal to 6.6 billion solar masses, plus or minus 400 million solar masses.
Not bad for a galaxy that's a mere 50 milllion light-years away.
"It is remarkable to have a galaxy of this size and a black hole of this mass so close to us," Gebhardt told journalists at the American Astronomical Society's winter meeting in Seattle. "It really is in our backyard."
The study has been accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal.
How they did it
Gebhardt's team used an instrument on the Gemini telescope known as the Near-Infrared Field Spectrograph to measure the speed of the stars orbiting the black hole. The telescope couldn't spot the individual stars — but thanks to adaptive optics, a technique that compensates for atmospheric distortions, the spectral measurements were fine enough to give the astronomers a sense of the average speed for bunches of stars.
One of Gebhardt's colleagues, graduate student Jeremy Murphy, used a different instrument on McDonald's Harlan J. Smith Telescope to track the motions of stars on the outskirts of M87. The VIRUS-P spectrograph gathered light from a "huge chunk of the sky" and come up with an estimate for the galaxy's total mass, including the mass of the dark matter halo surrounding the visible parts of the galaxy. The total came to 5.7 trillion solar masses, Murphy said.
Karl Gebhardt, an astronomer at the University of Texas at Austin, talks about the VIRUS-P instrument.
All those observations were fed into a computer model, which spit out the black hole mass of 6.6 billion suns, spread across a distance of about 20 billion kilometers. "This is three times the size of Pluto's orbit," said Gebhardt, who went on to note that M87's monster "could swallow our solar system whole."
Gebhardt said his team's efforts demonstrated that it was possible to weigh black holes in distant galaxies by measuring stellar motions with high-resolution instruments. "It gives us the confidence to be able to probe the galaxies that are much farther away," he said.
One such galaxy, 3.5 billion light-years away, is said to contain a black hole that's 18 billion times as massive as our sun. That would make even M87's black hole look like a pipsqueak. But the current estimate is based on indirect observations. Gebhardt would love to use more direct methods to confirm the estimate.
"It gives me fodder for future observing proposals," he told me.
To see a black hole
As any science-fiction fan knows, black holes are strange objects so dense that nothing, not even light, can escape its gravitational pull within a boundary known as the "event horizon." They may result from the catastrophic collapse of a dying star, or they may develop as the supermassive core of an entire galaxy. Astronomers have observed jets and bubbles of radiation that appear to emanate from black holes, and they've even spotted the whirling disks of hot material that surround active black holes. But no one has yet seen the black holes themselves.
"There's no direct evidence yet that black holes exist ... zero, absolutely zero observational evidence," Gebhardt said in a Gemini Observatory news release. "To infer a black hole currently, we choose the 'none of above' option. This is basically because alternative explanations are increasingly being ruled out."
Gebhardt would love to see a black hole, or at least the shadow of its event horizon, and he thinks M87 is the best candidate for that because it's so massive. Our own Milky Way's central black hole is much closer, of course — but it's also much smaller, weighing in at a mere 4 million solar masses. (That's 1 percent of the margin of error for the mass estimate of M87.)
Believe it or not, some astronomers already have a plan to look for the Milky Way's black hole, as part of a project called the Event Horizon Telescope. The plan calls for outfitting the radio telescopes of the Very Long Baseline Interferometer with submillimeter-wave receivers, which just might be able to produce an image of the event horizon when they're linked together.
"It's probably two or three years that we'll need to get there," Gebhardt said. And when the Event Horizon Telescope is ready to go, he hopes that M87 will be on the list of targets. "It is by far our cleanest and best case for a black hole," he said.
Other black hole news from the AAS meeting:
Caltech
These images show one of the newly discovered black-hole pairs. On the left is an image from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. On the right is a Keck image that resolves two active galactic nuclei, which are powered by massive black holes.
• Astronomers have discovered 16 close-knit pairs of supermassive black holes in merging galaxies, using imagery from the W.M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii. Caltech astronomer S. George Djorgovski said in a news release that the close pairs "are a missing link between the wide binary systems seen previously and the merging black-hole pairs at even smaller separations that we believe must be there." The 16 pairs were found among an array of 50 targets checked with the Keck 10-meter telescopes, with adaptive optics once again playing a crucial role.
The observations support the view that structures in the universe are assembled "through a hierarchy of mergers," Djorgovski told reporters. He joked that it would have been more interesting if the results contradicted theory, "but unfortunately, our understanding seems to be correct."
• Another team of astronomers observed the "heartbeats" seen in the light from a black hole system, using the space-based Chandra X-ray Observatory and the Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer. The study focused on GRS 1915+105, a binary system in the Milky Way galaxy thought to contain a black hole 14 times more massive than the sun. X-ray pulses emanated from the disk of material surrounding the black hole approximately every 50 seconds. By analyzing variations in the X-ray heartbeat, the astronomers could trace the flow of material into the black hole — and away from it.
"Each heartbeat blasts a new blob of material into the line of sight," Harvard's Joey Neilsen explained. "Ninety-five percent of the material coming in from the outside is actually being blown away by the black hole wind." The matter blown away from the accretion disk every day amounts to a third of the mass of the moon, Neilsen said.
Zoom in on the GRS 1915 black hole, courtesy of the Chandra X-ray Observatory.
More about black holes:
- See a black hole's blast
- PlayStation 3 tackles black-hole vibrations
- Instrument spots potential twin of Milky Way's black hole
- Supernovas starve supermassive black holes
- Which came first, black holes or galaxies?
- Stars form within black hole's destructive reach
- Search for more black holes at msnbc.com
In addition to Gebhardt and Murphy, co-authors of "The Black-Hole Mass in M87 From Gemini/NIFS Adaptive Optics Observations" include Joshua Adams, Douglas Richstone, Tod R. Lauer, S.M. Faber, Kayhan Gultekin and Scott Tremaine. Murphy, Gebhardt and Adams are the co-authors of "Galaxy Kinematics With VIRUS-P: The Dark Matter Halo of M87."
In addition to Djorgovski, co-authors of "Hierarchical Assembly of Supermassive Black Holes: Adaptive Optics Imaging of Double-Peaked [O III] Active Galactic Nuclei" include Hai Fu, Adam D. Myers and Lin Yan. The paper has been submitted to Astrophysical Journal Letters.
In addition to Neilsen, co-authors of "The Physics of Disk Winds, Jets, and X-ray Variability in GRS 1915+105" include Julia Lee and Ron Remillard.
Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" our Facebook page, or by following msnbc.com's science editor, Alan Boyle, on Twitter (@boyle).
Leave a Comment:
I think I just $h@t a few bricks...
Yeah Were Kinda F(/CKED...We dont know crap shoot from a hole in the ground about what we are doing to our own country, the ocean, the world, NOTHING... Our destiny is to be decided if we dont kill ourselves off first...
I think the notion of space flight is a waste of time. We should concentrate more on our problems here on earth. And if someone says we need to conquer space travel for our species to exist, I say if we can not solve our petty problems on earth, maybe we shuold go extinct.
fritz - Glad you feel that way, but for better or worse, i DO want to see the species survive. Which makes space flight a necessity, possibly to save us from ourselves.
"Heh-heh, heh-heh, he said, 'Black hole wind'," commented Beavis, and then he farted.
Huh huuhhh a huuhuhh ahhuahuhhuhuhuhuh Beavis stop being a bungwad you brown eye!
I have an ex-girlfriend that strongly resembles that first picture
Physics question, knowing the mass radius of a black hole would allow orbital velocity to be obtained at any given distance. If the distance of the event horizen is not the same how would one compute the actual mass radius?
that is big for something we have never seen....6.6 .4...I guess they figure they are over 90% correct?...ok that is all math abuse, I'll stop, if they will. While reading the story I could not help but wonder what is it about nature that a black hole is obscured by a dark (matter) halo.....no matter though, I will never see m87 quite the same through any telescope again...I hope more black holes are analyzed with these methods so we can see how our view of the universe is altered by the new masses (I think their technique will increase the predicted masses substantially). All in good fun but surely the next time someone sets a thesis with the predicted mass of the universe is x, I am gonna head straight for the skeptical web site ftl....does anyone think we can detect gravitational waves from m87 with current hardware?? (besides myself that is)
And your qualifications for being skeptical of this data is???
That's one massive black hole, but is it big? The singularity theory claims that the volume of a black hole is zero which, according to classic physics, would mean the density goes to infinity. But classic physics goes out the window close to a black hole because of the time and space distortions that occur.
It's a matter of semantics. The zero-sized singularity at the center contains all the matter... but the schwarzschild radius, which defines the event horizon -- what we typically refer to as the"black hole" -- is based on the mass: The more mass, the bigger the Schwarzchild radius. So, yeah, it's big.
But that still doesn't answer the question, does the mass compress infinitely, which would make no sense, or does it have some defined density, perhaps similar to that of a neutron star but even denser? If so, the "core" if you will, would have some volume, although a smaller radius than the Schwarzchild limit. And what would this black hole core material be made up of? Pure quarks compressed together? A massive collection of Higg's Bosons? Since all of this is invisibly hidden inside the event horizon, I suppose we'll never know.
You raise a good point, I am fairly sure we would find something akin to a quark in there. What ever it is it will be in a quantum state and I am fairly sure it will indeed exist in multiple planes of space and time. That is the beauty of our general ignorance in this case, we just do not know.
"Multiple planes of space and time" ?? Just what the heck does that mean? Is that where Jesus lives?
No it means that different airlines take you to destinations in space and to destinations in time.
Space, Time, different aircraft.
Nahh Jesus lives in my dryer, right next to Karl Marx and Elvis...Jeez I thought everyone knew that.
Quantization of space also doesn't jive well with the infinite density either.
So every spiral galaxy has a blackhole at it's center causing the galaxy to spin?
I can't imagine what else would have sufficient gravity to keep it from flying apart.
No, gravity has been shown to be absolutely insufficient to keep galaxies together. Dark matter is supposed to be doing the trick.
There is supposedly three times as much of it as normal matter.
But they just upped the mass of this black hole. Could "dark matter" consist of incorrect measurements of black hole masses and other masses (neutron stars, etc)? Could some of it also be the formerly"unseen" stars of distant galaxies, possibly even some in our own (recent article about using different techniques to find small stars in other galaxies)? Could some of it also be gas and such between stars, or even around stars, that has not been taken into account? Maybe the matter isn't "dark", maybe it's just hasn't been found yet or measured correctly?
Tony, I absolutely agree with you and have posited basically that exact idea on several threads here in the past. I see no need to theorize the existence of mysterious forms of unknown matter until we're sure just how much gas and dust and rocks and brown dwarves and anything else that is normal matter might be out there but just doesn't happen to emit light.
Using our own solar system as a small scale analog, we know most of the mass is in the sun, and a portion is in the planets, but do we really have any idea how much mass is out there in the Kuiper belt and the Oort cloud? It's all "dark," so we can't see it, so it's tough to tell.
Absolutely not true. Whe have observational evidence of the Milky Way's Black Hole and it can be found at http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-217835780363022047#
And to beat you to the punch, no, we can not "see" the black hole, we can see its effects on the surrounding stars.
I don't know anything about science or physics like the other posters so on behalf of all layman on the planet I would like to say, I thought Uranus was the biggest black hole in the galaxy. Ha Ha haaaa. That joke never gets old.
Thx for the early morning laugh hahahaaaa LMAO
Nice. :)
You better check your science on that one. From what I read, Uranus is the biggest BROWN hole in the galaxy. :-)
OK - here's another one:
What does the Starship Enterprise and toilet paper have in common?
They both get rid of Klingons around Uranus!
I heard that there's pictures of Uranus on the internet. That's pretty embarrassing.
What has always intrigued me is that black holes are spherical and all the information indicates that they are treated as two dimentional ie. the event horizon is a disk and there should be atleast a few stars which should be orbiting it in the other plane perpendicular to the event horizon plane . This is a difficult thing to accept , for me atleast.
This is because of the spin, the same as our star, which has a gravitational plane. So yes, the center object of a Black Hole should be spherical, and its rotation would cause a gravitational plane. That gravity effect becomes more pronounced the closer to the object to the point at which photons cannot escape the pull which is the event horizon. Stars do not orbit perpendicular to the plane from the same reason our planets, comets, meteors, etc do not revolve around our star in random orbital planes.
I barely grasp it, so please forgive my ham fisted attempt at an explanation. :)
From video simulations which I have seen of the orbital tracks of stars very close to the black hole at the center of the Milky Way, or SagittariusA, they do NOT all track in a nice horizontal flat disk. Some of them are orbiting very close, very fast, and at very whacky and strange angles to each other. It's the extremely fast orbits of these stars around a region of "nothing" which is the evidence that a black hole is there.
The bulge of stars around the center of our galaxy is sperical nearly, so what is the relationship to this nearly sperical bulge and the spin with respect to the rest of the galactic structure? Are the angular velocities of these stars in accordance with the arm stars? If so then there are anomalies which would be seen, to bad that the studies I have seen are less likely to relate to black hole SPIN! Interestingly enough that all the missing Mass/Energy ignores the simple fact that the photon fills the entire universe and they are all invisible with the minor exception of those very few that we see . These little packets of energy and mass are infinite in number and are ignored entirely in the overall discussion of the mass/energy equations I have been exposed to.
Mikey, To you point that there are stars orbiting at other that horizon plane then shouldn't we see them eclipse or go behind the black hole and wouldn't that make for some great observational science!!
http://www.astro.ucla.edu/~ghezgroup/gc/pictures/orbitsMovie.shtml
That was cool edmgeno and it was also enlightening there appears to be one star which might pass behind the hole sometime in the near future and a study of that would really be interesting to see! Maybe they'll use the new interferometer and get some great observational data I wwould love to see that ! Great stuff thanks a bunch for it
21 stars (plus the black hole) in 27 cubic light years (3 by 3 by 3). Crazy neighbourhood ! Galactic tornado ! and there is probably a lot of other junk swirling about that we can't see. Shields up !
I imagine those stars are seriously distorted especially near the b.h. ( S0-16's closest approach (for now) is only 90 au (about 3x Neptune's orbit). I wish I could find some speeds for them.
Did you try the link in 7.1 from Michael in S J ? It gives a 3d perspective.
No, I haven't But I certainly will, The new scopes in chile will give a much needed upgrade in these studies considering they can see the galactic core more clearly from the southern hemi. Gonna enjoy the results from that observatory about a much as I have from Hubble STS.
Isn't it time we drop the "Black Hole" name, "Event Horizon" 2 dimensional view, and the concept of a "Worm Hole" as some kind of trans-dimensional vacuum within a vacuum and obtain a more grounded approach?
What was described by Fred Hoyle as "like a black hole" is immensely great MASS creating a gravity well from which nothing escapes, including light.
The popular funnel diagram of how a 'black hole' works is fundamentally two-dimensional because it is described from our viewpoint. It's like describing the ocean horizon from a point on land but there is more ocean horizon the further you move from land because the event horizon is a sphere surrounding the mass at the center.
Since the mass at the center is a sphere there can be no wormhole going inwards because it would have to exit the other end and there would be no other end, just compression at the center.
Though the mass in and of itself is dangerous to anything caught within it's pull there is the greater danger of the continued amassing of matter and the increased compression - ignition. When it goes Nova (Latin for 'new') there will be a new star in the universe and the complete obliteration of objects in the blast field and affects for parsecs beyond from the entire spectrum of produced radiations.
On a smaller note, dealing with just one sun, ours, one wonders if at the Big Bang time what is now our sun wasn't a small, dense, dark mass surrounded by a ring, and beyond that 5 or 6 planets. Over the eons it accumulated and compacted until it ignition. With that the nearest large planet was obliterated to become the asteroid belt and the planets beyond, in descending size, became known as Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune, Uranus, and the discredited Pluto. Other space objects fell into orbit around the sun at various times giving us the inner planets with Venus the last to join the family.
What became Earth, and ice-clad rock, was being pulled toward the dense mass just as it ignited, raining a gamut of radiation, including heat and electrical energy, creating life in an astronomical instant. Rather than being blown away it was pulled around the new sun in the new solar system.
Now there is an alternate universe, alternate life on Earth creation story for you.
What?
Solar genesis is a quite solid science.
http://burro.astr.cwru.edu/stu/advanced/stars_birth.html
Yup, and so were the Flat Earth and Earth as the center of the Universe views according to the science of their time. Locking yourself into something that could change down the road is not a comfortable position. People have always assumed, since they had cognitive intelligence, they knew they were right about everything until proof otherwise kicked'em in the face.
To: M. Tipton, Qualifications for being skeptical? How about, I'm a human being with a brain? Since when does someone need a Phd. to be skeptical? Black holes, dark matter, dark energy etc.etc. - not a single shred of observed solid evidence for any of this nonsense. Everyone should be skeptical.
Czeke, I'm with you completely. Data such as the pioneer anomaly, flyby anomaly, and the galaxy rotation problem indicate that we don't have a complete understanding of gravity and should not be wasting time with advanced calculations on concepts like black holes and dark matter which may be way off the mark. There is far too much speculation and assumption in professional astronomy.
I concur completely. Those that doubt the skeptics due to lack of accreditation are in fact themselves discredited in the end. It does not matter if you understand quantum theory or string theory as long as you understand human theory, which states; when we do not know the answer we make one up to keep our limited perception of our reality intact. It is usually the most educated who are the least practical in these matters and I for one find it laughable to question someone’s ability to be skeptical. I would love to see the event horizon of gravity well but since we are talking about something that is 20b kilometers in diameter who knows how far out the actual event horizon extends. Personally I think time and gravity are very strongly related, maybe even the same thing.
There is observed evidence for the existence of the black hole at the center of the Milky Way, known as SagittariusA. The stars which near it orbit very quickly, their paths have been tracked and plotted, but they orbit around a region which basically seems to contain... nothing. That's where the black hole is. We can't see it or observe it directly, but there is definitely real observable evidence that it is there.
No then, as for "dark matter" and "dark energy", I'm totally with you. These phony theoretical inventions may be nothing but fudge factors invented to make up for badly calibrated observations and mistaken assumptions. Hooey.
Dark matter could be nothing more than unobservable gas and dust, and if there's way more of that within interstellar and intergalactic space than has been accounted for, then maybe that's throwing off the calculated distances to these far off galaxies which are supposedly increasing in their rate of receding.
Good reply, Mikey.
Just because we can't see the object itself does not mean there's no observational evidence. No *direct* observational evidence, i.e. looking at the object itself doesn't mean we should be skeptical to the point of discounting it.
No one has seen a living, breathing, Neaderthal... but there is plenty of evidence. Few who accept science will say that we shouldn't accept their existence in the past as a fundamentally sound theory.
And I agree with you on the Dark Matter/Dark Energy point. The only evidence (that I know of) is that galaxies spin faster than calculations say they should based on the matter they can see. Translating that into an exotic form of matter or energy is about as accurate as the invention of the Luminiferous Aether based on the idea that electromagnetic waves absolutely, positively *cannot* exist without a medium.
It must be the "phlogiston"!
Thank you for the replies and support. Some good points were made. I wish I could remember the name of the scientist I saw on tv who said, "Dark Energy is code for we don't know." Certainly there is something at the center of our galaxy (and all the rest of them). Whatever it is, we have come to know it as a black hole. Some amazing science is done to study these things, but I don't think we really have any idea what we are looking at. Not even close. Now some guy comes along and says he measured the mass and size of it. It's fun to speculate, I just think the margin of error should be adjusted to something closer to 100%.
Try this:
http://www.astro.ucla.edu/~ghezgroup/gc/pictures/orbitsMovie.shtml
Interesting site, thanks for the tip. A lot to digest there, I will be going back for a better look. The science to make the observations is impressive. It's the conclusions we draw from them I am skeptical of.
EDMgeno, That's the video I was talking about in 9.2, thanks!
Here's another interesting link:
http://ww.space.com/8588-dark-energy-dark-matter-exist-scientists-allege.html
All this technology yet not enough interest to solve some of earth's other serious problems!!!! Problems like: Fuel prices? Jobs? High taxes? Common cold? Homeless humanitary-isms? Crime? Prison problems? Stupid law's problems? ETC!!!!!
Technology can not solve every human problem. To me, the bulk of the problems people have are kind of like the person smoking while saying "I hope I don't get cancer."
In other words: We're digging our own holes. We have tons of resources but we waste them. It's not technologies fault that we're so far gone from common sense and a healthy respect for one another.
There's always gonna be a country on the brink of collapse, or a starving child, or high unemployment somewhere. That's business-as-usual with humanity. It's dumb to think that we should put progress on hold until every organism on the planet is happy, stuffed full of food, and wildly successful. There's enough of us here on this planet to split the available resources to solve these problems. Some of us can create more jobs, feed that starving kid across the world, and reign-in rogue governments, and others can analyze the universe, advance medicines, and find newer, safer and more efficient ways to do things.
has any thought ever been given to a continual rebirth of the universe due to larger black holes eating smaller black halls which had eaten all matter until there is only one black hole that collapses into itself until it reaches the tennis ball size that is the point where the suppressed explosive power of all of the matter in the old universe overwhelms the black hole's gravity and there is another big bang? and so forth.
What if all the matter in the universe fell into a single black hole, except for one star and its planets. Would there be enough energy in the black hole to spawn a big bang genesis without that additional mass? If there was enough energy, would the inhabitants of a planet circling this star have the wonderful experience to witness creation? Would they marvel at how the night sky went from total blackness to a sudden flash beyond all they had ever known? Would the energy expelled from the Big Bang destroy this star system?
Yes, Bill, I have wondered if that might be the case. So have others, it's sometimes called the Big Crunch scenario which may have preceded the Big Bang. Whether it's possibly true depends a lot on whether the supposedly increasing rate of expansion due to some mystically purported "dark energy" is true. Perhaps you can tell from my tone that I'm a bit skeptical about that.
In other words, if there's sufficient mass in the entire universe to gravitationally overcome the energy and momentum of the big bang, then eventually it'll all collapse back down to the center (and perhaps explode again in a cyclical pattern...?). If not, than maybe it just keeps on expanding into cold entropy and we end with a whimper instead of a bang. Or maybe, just maybe, there really is something to this "dark energy" business and we all go zinging off to who knows where? But I kind of doubt it.
Another theory: electrons go around nuclei, planets go around stars, stars orbit the center of galaxies (or black holes). Has anyone thought that galaxies are going around "something"? Has this been looked into? Maybe the 'expansion' we see is actually movement in a circle, possibly distorted due to distances traveled by the light/energy souces or gravitationally 'lensed'?
Just sayin'...
Hmmm... fascinating idea Tony! What would be the great attractor? The mother of all black holes at the center of everything?
"has any thought ever been given..."
I believe that's one of the very FIRST ideas, back in the 1st half of the last century.
Not to sound derisive, but...have you been living in a cave?
"estimate of 6.4 billion suns."
PHUCK!
This is a very interesting site except for the commercial interuption
Bill Perrin1686039,I had suggested that a few months ago but no one replied to the idea. I had mentioned that there be not one BIG BANG, but continual ones, each galaxy birthing another as the black hole reached some point where the amount of matter taken in would produce igition. this might explain the left over radiation and the other forces seen but not explained.
just random thoughts without backup.
Hi Mary,
see my comment #14.2 above.
How does anyone know that this equation or whatever is accurate until we can actually measure it?
I could say that it 6.5billion whatevers - prove me wrong
Forgive my ignorance , but are you implying that because we don't have definitive physical evidence its folly to postulate on our observations ? What if Kepler , Einstein , Hubble , had assumed your position ? The quickest path to super stardom in science is to disprove a long standing theory, the quickest way to get laughed out of your field is propose a theory you can't support mathematically. It's called trial and error for a reason , that's how we make advances in science . We are stand on the shoulders of giants .
@ # 11 - 11.2 : )
No, I am saying without skepticism there would be no advancement, to imply there is an educational minimum to allow for skepticism is folly. Einstein was a patent clerk, Kepler was a philosopher, genius has no pretense. That is what I was commenting on, as for the rest well what is there to comment on? It can neither be confirmed nor denied thus it is merely a theory. I think we will find our perception challenged in many ways in the near future with the overwhelming advances we are facing on all fronts. In the end it is all moot, we do not exist long enough to actually get to the bottom of anything. Hence my two cents, I was replying more to:
M. Tipton
And your qualifications for being skeptical of this data is???
#3.1 - Thu Jan 13, 2011 6:26 AM EST
more than the rest of that particular thread.
Nothing wrong with skepticism. There is, however, something wrong with inane skepticism coming from someone raising objections simply because he is not equipped to understand the material.
What is there not to understand? The act of trying to qualify someone's skepticism based on relative intelligence is inane.
We should NEVER give up on space flight, etc. That is what helps drive technology and the economy which can in turn improve life for the rest of us.
The information being collected is so may light years old, how can it be pertinent?
Understanding black holes at all stages of their lifetime is pertinent to a better understanding of black holes. Why would ANY information that had been collected be less or not pertinent simply because it's old?
How could it not be pertinent? At the time of observation, it was the only data available. If in a thousand years the data changes that significantly, adjustments will be made.
That's science for you - the world that can be observed.
This is just like boneless chicken, it's mind-boggling. Waaaay beyond my comprehension level.
Let's get back to something I can understand, like what the Aliens did with Elvis or when our government will announce first contact with the Vulcans. (I"m betting on 1947, Roswell, no wait, that was the Ferengi)
6.4 BILL-YUN suns? Absolutely mind-boggling.
Hiya Skip! LMAO boneless chicken... hilarious!
Skepticism is critical in the scientifc method. The issue at hand is the difference between skepticism and opinion. You have to ask yourself what is it about a theory don't you like, is the math too complex, are there too many variables, are there competing theories or is it a gut feeling? To say you are skeptical of a theory without pinpointing specifically the problem or without alternative theories amounts to opinion, which is then tossed out.
The mass of the black hole in question is determined by the speed of the orbits of nearby stars or angular velocity. The higher the orbital speed the greater the gravitational force. Since the mass of the orbiting stars can be approximated through the determination of a stars luminosity a mass of a second object can then be determined. Basic Newtonian physics.
Any visual model that is used to describe a black hole is at best a simple representation. The extreme curvature of spacetime around a black hole makes any real world model incomprehensible. This is why mathematical formulas are used to represent the singularity, it is better understood as math formulas than a picture. The math involved is very complex, but the mathematical understanding is critical to understanding the concept of a black hole and without the math the concept is reduced to speculation and opinion.
TReed,
I have to respectfully disagree with you. I'm not an astrophysicist, I'm just a high school math teacher who likes science. As such, I don't know the formulas and equations by which the Schwarzchild radius is calculated, but I do understand in theory what it means. Perhaps my understanding could be deepened, sure, but that doesn't mean that I, or any other "lay person" can't grasp the essence of what's going on, based of course, on a decent understanding of rudimentary Newtonian and Einsteinian physics.
In other words, even though I teach math, I realize it's not always about the math. As I understand it, Einstein himself hated math. It was apparently his worst subject in school.
I would like to interject that you both can be correct and wrong on this one. I lean more towards MikeyMike's stance on this subject though. While it's true that a firm grasp of fundamental physics helps one mentally visualize the black hole it is in no way necessary. I was never cared for math until after high school. And I only took art classes in college, but eventually dropped out to find work that would pay the bills. Now I work as a drafter in a structural engineering firm and have a fond appreciation for what I missed all those years. I have developed a true love for math that I never thought possible while I was in school.
But, before I found math and tried to understand the universe mathematically I understood the world around me through my artist capabilities. Spatial references always came easily and representing a 3 dimensional subject matter on a 2 dimensional medium a fairly simple thing to do. From the first time I had ever heard of a black hole the idea intrigued me.
I didn't actually see a representation of the black hole until much later. But the idea was clear. A field of spacetime affected in such a way as to be inescapable. I don't claim to know much of anything about black holes but if it can be described to me in english I can usually describe it on paper as an illustration.
Imagine 6.6 billion Suns squeezed into an area a few times the size of our solar system and then imagine what that might do to the field of space time. I will admit that comprehension of such a thing may be difficult to some people but I will argue all day that it can be understood without use of math.
Thank you Mob, now then, with all that said and done, I'll turn right around and admit along with TReed that if one wants to make any sort of accurate and testable predictions about the behavior of photons or anything else in the presence of such supermassive objects, by which I mean doing real science, that indeed is going to require some math, and way more of it in this case than I care to stomach.
Meanwhile, it's fun to think and conjecture and discuss and debate along with the rest of y'all!
Indeed, mathematics is the language of the universe, and it's VERY fun to discuss these topics with everyone.
Mob and Mikey a point that I wanted to make but didn't that we can't visually see beyond the event horizon, so the actual singularity can only be defined through the mathematics and any visualization is speculation at best. Personally I hate the 2-dimensional view of a gravity well, too many view that graphic as the actual curvature of the space. The point of view I prefer to resemble a black hole would be to depict the the spacetime density of a blackhole. By this I use the assumption that in a gravity free zone of space, that said space is expanding, "dark energy" is used by the astrophysicists. In the prescence of gravity the expansion is reduced, thereby having more of the spacetime fabric. Example, take a piece of paper, in a flat state it represents space with no gravitational influences. Now crumple the paper into a tight little ball. It's the same amount of spacetime but confined to a smaller area.
Alan:
Shouldn't a Black Hole actually be a Black Ball like the sun is a ball and not just two dimensional from our prespective? If we can not see what the dark area is, we wouldn't know if it has other dimensions or not from our perspective.
If it is a Hole only it could be two dimensional on this obverse side and two dimensional on the reverse side. If so wouldn't there be a lot of Black Holes out there that can not be seen or measured at 90 degrees from the point where the holes are found? Thus the missing weight.
Once you get beyond that line of sight, would we be able to see the reverse side of the black hole? Not being three dimensional, one would think we would see the reverse side immediately when at the -89 degree point. If so then, would not the Black hole be a four dimensional object? Two on the front side and two on the back?
Also if the amount of energy is being sucked into the front dimension, what would that energy look like on the reverse side? Would it be just gamma radiation or could it be light? Could the light we see as stars actually be the reverse dimensions of Black Holes?
I can not answer most of your question DelFairchild, but I do know this much (although I was not the one to make these observations) - We can infer the spherical shape of a black "hole" because of our observations of the things that orbit around it. Much of the stuff that orbits a galactic core for example does not orbit it on the same plane. So it acts very much like an atom with electrons whizzing around it. I don't know much about it but I have seen a history channel program about the discovery of observational evidence that points to the supermassive black hole at the center of the milky way.
But no one has yet seen God Himself, there's no direct evidence yet that God exists... zero, absolutely zero observational evidence, says the atheistic scientists who doubt that God exists......YET they believe in unseen invisble black holes for which there's no direct evidence.....zero, absolutely zero evidence, zero observational evidence that black holes exist. Their HYPOCRISY IS ASTRONOMICAL!!!!!!(Literally) "We see the black hole's effects." Well, likewise, we see the unseen God's effects too!!!! That's why I believe in BOTH God and blackholes.
"God? I have no need of that Hypothesis."
-- Pierre-Simon Laplace
Are you sure? There is direct evidence of Black holes and the effects they have on stars and matter surrounding them, we have direct visual evidence of this. Check out The History Channels Universe series, you can get it on Youtube you can even download the episode about black holes. Its kind of hard to deny the existance of black holes when you have obsevable proof of their existance.
Can you please help me by pointing out the God effects you have observed? I would be interested to know what they are.