Captain Nartman
17-06-2009, 03:28 PM
Six Billion Suns -The Biggest Black Holes in the Universe Just Got Bigger (http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2009/06/6-billion-suns-the-biggest-black-holes-in-the-universe-just-got-bigger.html)
http://www.dailygalaxy.com/.a/6a00d8341bf7f753ef0115711a2e74970b-320wi (http://www.dailygalaxy.com/.a/6a00d8341bf7f753ef0115711a2e74970b-pi) The biggest things in the universe just got bigger - or rather, they've always been bigger and we somehow missed it up to now. Supercomputer simulations of galactic core black holes indicate that instead of being a mere two billion times the mass of the sun, so insignificant you'd surely lose them if you sneezed, some could be as large as six billion suns.
The study by scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Studies (which couldn't sound smarter if it was Lex Luthor's university degree) focused on Messier 87, a particularly bright active galaxy in the Virgo cluster whose size, strong signals and proximity to Earth make it a common astronomical experimentation subject. Dr Karl Gebhart and colleagues ran a supercomputer simulation to calculate the mass of the monster at M87's core.
You need to simulate a black hole's size because there's no way to observe its mass directly - you can only infer its immensity by studying the effects on the mass around it (little things like entire galaxies). Where the new model differs from past efforts is its inclusion of the "dark halo", an unobservable ring of dark matter which astrophysicists now believe surround galaxies. Including something you can't see might sound like a great way to get any answer you like, but the simulation worked it out by observing the effects of this halo on the visible stars, then accounting for those calculated effects when simulating the black hole - which is why the program took several days to run on a computer that could probably calculate you to ten decimal places in one minute.
Don't worry, the results aren't entirely dependent on the dark matter magic-factor which affects so much of current cosmology - the results seem to explain observations which previously puzzled many scientists (always a good sign for a new result).
Recordings of distant quasars show evidence of black holes far larger than anything we've ever seen closer to home. Now it seems that they were here all along, we just weren't looking at them right.
Posted by Luke McKinney.
Giant Black Holes Get Even Bigger http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8091271.stm
N x
http://www.dailygalaxy.com/.a/6a00d8341bf7f753ef0115711a2e74970b-320wi (http://www.dailygalaxy.com/.a/6a00d8341bf7f753ef0115711a2e74970b-pi) The biggest things in the universe just got bigger - or rather, they've always been bigger and we somehow missed it up to now. Supercomputer simulations of galactic core black holes indicate that instead of being a mere two billion times the mass of the sun, so insignificant you'd surely lose them if you sneezed, some could be as large as six billion suns.
The study by scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Studies (which couldn't sound smarter if it was Lex Luthor's university degree) focused on Messier 87, a particularly bright active galaxy in the Virgo cluster whose size, strong signals and proximity to Earth make it a common astronomical experimentation subject. Dr Karl Gebhart and colleagues ran a supercomputer simulation to calculate the mass of the monster at M87's core.
You need to simulate a black hole's size because there's no way to observe its mass directly - you can only infer its immensity by studying the effects on the mass around it (little things like entire galaxies). Where the new model differs from past efforts is its inclusion of the "dark halo", an unobservable ring of dark matter which astrophysicists now believe surround galaxies. Including something you can't see might sound like a great way to get any answer you like, but the simulation worked it out by observing the effects of this halo on the visible stars, then accounting for those calculated effects when simulating the black hole - which is why the program took several days to run on a computer that could probably calculate you to ten decimal places in one minute.
Don't worry, the results aren't entirely dependent on the dark matter magic-factor which affects so much of current cosmology - the results seem to explain observations which previously puzzled many scientists (always a good sign for a new result).
Recordings of distant quasars show evidence of black holes far larger than anything we've ever seen closer to home. Now it seems that they were here all along, we just weren't looking at them right.
Posted by Luke McKinney.
Giant Black Holes Get Even Bigger http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8091271.stm
N x