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Tens of Millions of Black Holes Likely to Exist in the Milky Way Galaxy

posted by martyb on Thursday August 10 2017, @02:58PM   Printer-friendly
from the a-topic-of-extreme-gravity dept.

takyon writes:

Black holes are more common than previously thought, explaining why they can collide and merge, creating detectable gravitational waves:

After conducting a cosmic inventory of sorts to calculate and categorize stellar-remnant black holes, astronomers from the University of California, Irvine have concluded that there are probably tens of millions of the enigmatic, dark objects in the Milky Way – far more than expected.

"We think we've shown that there are as many as 100 million black holes in our galaxy," said UCI chair and professor of physics & astronomy James Bullock, co-author of a research paper on the subject in the current issue of Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society [open, DOI: 10.1093/mnras/stx1959] [DX].

[...] "We have a pretty good understanding of the overall population of stars in the universe and their mass distribution as they're born, so we can tell how many black holes should have formed with 100 solar masses versus 10 solar masses," Bullock said. "We were able to work out how many big black holes should exist, and it ended up being in the millions – many more than I anticipated." [...] "We show that only 0.1 to 1 percent of the black holes formed have to merge to explain what LIGO saw," [Manoj] Kaplinghat said. "Of course, the black holes have to get close enough to merge in a reasonable time, which is an open problem."

That sucks.

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  • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 10 2017, @03:15PM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 10 2017, @03:15PM (#551661)

    So are there enough of those black holes to explain dark matter?

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  • (Score: 3, Funny) by JoeMerchant on Thursday August 10 2017, @04:35PM

    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Thursday August 10 2017, @04:35PM (#551713)

    So are there enough of those black holes to explain dark matter?

    If you want them to, there can be exactly enough of those black holes to explain dark matter.

    --
    🌻🌻 [google.com]

  • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 10 2017, @05:42PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 10 2017, @05:42PM (#551760)

    I think this is more invisible stuff in addition to dark matter and dark energy. So if those two account for 96% of the universe, and there are 10^8 black holes each the mass of 30 suns in a galaxy with the mass of 10^12 suns, we should add another 0.3% giving 96.3%.

    https://www.space.com/11642-dark-matter-dark-energy-4-percent-universe-panek.html [space.com]