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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: 3, Informative) by takyon on Thursday August 10 2017, @04:25PM

    by takyon (881) <takyonNO@SPAMsoylentnews.org> on Thursday August 10 2017, @04:25PM (#551708) Journal

    They may have taken the "picture" in April:

    http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-38937141 [bbc.com]

    Scientists believe they are on the verge of obtaining the first ever picture of a black hole. They have built an Earth-sized "virtual telescope" by linking a large array of radio receivers - from the South Pole, to Hawaii, to the Americas and Europe. There is optimism that observations to be conducted during 5-14 April could finally deliver the long-sought prize.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Event_Horizon_Telescope [wikipedia.org]

    Data collected on hard drives must be transported by jet airliner (a so-called sneakernet) from the various telescopes to the MIT Haystack Observatory in Massachusetts, USA, where the data are cross-correlated and analyzed on a grid computer made from about 800 CPUs all connected through a 40 Gbit/s network.

    ETA not stated, but it could be any day now.

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