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

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?

    • (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.

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    • (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]

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 10 2017, @03:18PM (11 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 10 2017, @03:18PM (#551662)

    Do we know without a doubt that they exist at all? Because according to theory, the whole universe should get swallowed up, right?

    • (Score: 5, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 10 2017, @03:23PM (6 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 10 2017, @03:23PM (#551665)

      Because according to theory, the whole universe should get swallowed up, right?

      Wrong. Unless you come really close, a black hole is just a massive object like any other (well, except for the fact that it doesn't emit or reflect light). If the sun were suddenly replaced by a black hole of the same mass, the planets would continue to move exactly the same way as they do now.

      • (Score: 5, Informative) by pTamok on Thursday August 10 2017, @04:11PM (5 children)

        by pTamok (3042) on Thursday August 10 2017, @04:11PM (#551699)

        Nit-pick here.

        Not quite exactly. They would no longer experience the solar wind [wikipedia.org], or radiation pressure [wikipedia.org], which would probably decrease the orbital radius slightly. In addition, I don't know if the Sun's magnetic field and a black hole's would be similar enough not to have different interactions with any planetary magnetic fields and peturb their orbits as well.

        The effects are probably small.

        • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 10 2017, @05:06PM (3 children)

          by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 10 2017, @05:06PM (#551733)

          +1 Pedantic

          • (Score: 3, Touché) by bob_super on Thursday August 10 2017, @09:58PM (2 children)

            by bob_super (1357) on Thursday August 10 2017, @09:58PM (#551899)

            Not quite pedantic enough. At least Mercury and Venus would also be affected by the dramatic change in surface temps, probably fractionally speeding up their rotation.

            • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday August 11 2017, @03:04AM (1 child)

              by JoeMerchant (3937) on Friday August 11 2017, @03:04AM (#552076)

              Rotation, or orbit? I think Mercury's rotation would remain gravitationally locked, although a change in orbit is still a change in rotation in that case.

              Venus' atmosphere should condense/compress so it should start to rotate a bit faster, shorter days - if you still measure days by the stars.

              But, I don't see the cooling affecting orbital speed, maybe the absence of solar wind, though I can't help but think that would be trivial compared to the shockwave that might originate from just outside the event horizon as the sun's outer layers get sucked in / compressed / detonated in heavy fusion reactions / partially slung out due to radically increased rotational velocities.

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              • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 11 2017, @03:29AM

                by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 11 2017, @03:29AM (#552094)

                Another nitpick, Mercury's rotation is in resonance, but it is not locked.

        • (Score: 2) by inertnet on Thursday August 10 2017, @07:02PM

          by inertnet (4071) on Thursday August 10 2017, @07:02PM (#551807) Journal

          Ok, let's try that and make measurements to settle this argument.

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

      by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> 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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    • (Score: 0, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 10 2017, @05:39PM (2 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 10 2017, @05:39PM (#551757)

      You'll never find one for real. The acceleration attributed to black holes is electromotive force from the same galactic currents who's z-pinch creates arms of spiral galaxies.

      Also, Quasars prove non-cosmological redshift exists. They're not brighter than entire galaxies, redshift can just be caused by refraction and other effects rather than ONLY cosmological expansion. However, if you start accounting for things like that, and begin giving people an accurate picture of the cosmos then you get drummed out of academia.

      Meanwhile isn't it funny how astronomers ignore all the optical properties of light passing through different densities causing orange sunsets and light to bend through water, etc. just to attribute the same effects to "warped space time". TL;DR: No one disproved the null hypothesis for any of Einsteins theories. That's because they're bogus.

      • (Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 10 2017, @06:20PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 10 2017, @06:20PM (#551786)

        If black holes don't exist, where did you crawl out of? The Time Cube?

      • (Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 10 2017, @07:21PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 10 2017, @07:21PM (#551817)

        However, if you start accounting for things like that, and begin giving people an accurate picture of the cosmos then you get drummed out of academia.

        Let me guess, "They LAUGHED when I presented my theories to the Royal Academy! I will show them all, when I perfect my non-cosmological expanding Black Hole weapon, and demand that they grant me ONE MILLION doctorate degrees! Ha Ha HA!! MuHa ha ha ha. . . ."

  • (Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 10 2017, @04:38PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 10 2017, @04:38PM (#551715)

    Tens of millions of black holes?

    Did someone point a telescope at Africa?

  • (Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Thursday August 10 2017, @10:10PM (1 child)

    by Grishnakh (2831) on Thursday August 10 2017, @10:10PM (#551906)

    This reminds me of an episode of Stargate where a team is on some planet, and a black hole opens up nearby while the stargate is open, and threatens to suck the Earth in through the stargate if they can't close it.

    Maybe one will open up near Earth sometime soon.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 11 2017, @12:25AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 11 2017, @12:25AM (#551970)

    I read the news today, oh boy.
    Millions of black holes in the Milky Way.
    And though the holes were not beheld
    They found they had to meld.
    Now they know that relativity is gonna be upheld.
    I'd love to turn you on.

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