While reading Ars Technica, I came upon this article: "Supermassive black hole binary discovered — The best candidate yet for a system of two SMBHs orbiting each other."
Here is some background from Wikipedia: "A supermassive black hole (SMBH) is the largest type of black hole, on the order of hundreds of thousands to billions of solar masses (M☉) and are found in the center of almost all massive galaxies." And, "a solar mass is about 332,946 times the mass of the Earth (M⊕)."
For the curious, take a look at this list of most massive black holes which enumerates seventeen SMBHs of at least one billion solar masses. The SMBH at the center of our Milky Way galaxy is estimated at a relatively small(*) 4.1 million solar masses.
From Ars:
To make their discovery, the research team examined data on quasars from the Catalina Real-time Transient Survey, which has been collecting data since 2009; they also looked at archived data going back to 1993. The data was used to track the quasars’ light curves, which show the object’s brightness over time. Light curves are useful for objects that have variable brightness, because they make it easy to pick out regular patterns in the variation.
Of all the quasars examined, 20 were good candidates for having regular variations. Of those, the strongest candidate is called PG 1302-102, which the researchers examined in detail. Its light curve resembled a sine wave, its light’s intensity gradually increasing and decreasing with a period of about 60 months.
A major challenge in this research was resolving whether they found a single SMBH or a pair of SMBHs that were close(*) together. The authors considered a number of possibilities, and based on nearly a quarter million modeling experiments among other techniques, concluded the most likely explanation to be that there were, indeed, two SMBHs present.
I find these discoveries to be absolutely amazing! Where else can one use the term small to refer to something having four million times the mass of the sun or the word close to referring to objects that are some fraction of a parsec (3.26 light years) apart.
The research was published in Nature with an abstract available there. The Cornell University Library has both the abstract and the full report (pdf).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 11 2015, @04:31AM
So, couple of LoC, give/take?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 12 2015, @09:05AM
Lines of Code?
Level of Consciousness?
Lab-on-a-Chip?
Whaaat?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by AnonTechie on Sunday January 11 2015, @08:29AM
The two super massive black holes are likely to collide/merge sometime in the future. What will they call this merged entity ?
Quite significant indeed !!
Albert Einstein - "Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."
(Score: 2) by nitehawk214 on Sunday January 11 2015, @09:01AM
They will call it a supermassive black hole. Most of them evolved by merging black holes together. Hopefully we can learn how by observing these.
"Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -Loiosh
(Score: 3, Funny) by Bot on Sunday January 11 2015, @03:56PM
An expert of supermassive black hole binaries, Lennart P., suggests naming it "systemd-minimal".
Account abandoned.
(Score: 3, Informative) by martyb on Sunday January 11 2015, @05:25PM
Back in June of 2014, SN carried the story Black Holes at Center of Galaxies Might Instead be Wormholes [soylentnews.org]. There was a quite a discussion there. Most amazing to me was this comment [soylentnews.org] which noted that there are a variety of black holes depending on shape, rotation, and charge, e.g.:
That comment went into some of the ramifications of these different kinds of black holes colliding. For starters, shooting just one electron straight at a Schwarzschild hole makes it charged, thus transforming it into a Reisser-Noerdstrom hole. That something of such seemingly negligible mass (an electron) can change the characteristics of a SMBH (an object having thousands or millions or billions of solar masses) — my head hurts just considering such a thing! Then step things up to having one SMBH collide with another SMBH (each of different possible sizes, rotations, and charges) ... further brain pain!
A quick scan of the full report [cornell.edu] reveals that it is way over my head; have they determined what kind(s) of black hole(s) they have found? Or, is that not possible to determine at these distances? What would happen when/if they were to collide?
Wit is intellect, dancing.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 12 2015, @08:32PM
For starters, shooting just one electron straight at a Schwarzschild hole makes it charged, thus transforming it into a Reisser-Noerdstrom hole. That something of such seemingly negligible mass (an electron) can change the characteristics of a SMBH (an object having thousands or millions or billions of solar masses) — my head hurts just considering such a thing!
You're reading way to much into this. These are just mathematical models. The Schwarzschild black hole is just an edge case of the other ones, when they have zero charge and or rotation. So the transformation you're speaking of is a gentle, continuous one. It's like a circle is a special kind of ellipse when the eccentricity is zero.
The model most likely to correspond with reality is the Kerr one. Why?
Rotation: Because most primordial clouds have momentum that causes the stars that form from them to rotate, and when they collapse, the black hole will conserve angular momentum.
No charge: Because the electromagnetic force is a very strong force (1e50 times stronger than gravity), and there are loose charges (electrons and protons) available in the universe. So a black hole could build up a small charge, but would then start attracting surrounding gas with opposite charge, and neutralize itself. So long as there are mobile charges around, there will be no "electric universe".