Astronomers find biggest black hole, 17 BILLION times the size of Sun A team at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy has found the largest recorded black hole, one that swallows an unprecedented amount of its home galaxy, potentially requiring a rethink in our understanding of galactic formation. The huge hole has been spotted in the heart of the disk system NGC 1277, a smallish galaxy about …
I saw the "click to enlarge" link on Karl's picture and got scared.
What happens when two galaxies collide, actually not much since there is so much distance between the stars.
But if the black hole is is on the right trajectory it can swallow up most of the other galaxy and possibly merge the two black holes.
I am curious who funds this work? It is tuition or part of our $16B of debt?
Looses all credibility using the "Chicken and egg" causality dilemma. It's the Egg! The modern chicken came from an egg laid by its predecessor, a chicken like bird.
Now. Do black holes spawn galaxies, or do galaxies spawn black holes? Perhaps black holes are formed early in the universe and swirl up the soup of matter created by the big bang and form galaxies?
Probably not, but just putting it out there.....
But the chicken and egg scenario does not just relate to that single first chicken.
You said that a chicken like bird laid the egg so it came first. Well, was this bird born or from an egg? The precursor to this bird, was that born or from an egg. Keep going. That is what it refers to.
You make a great point regarding the galaxies though. Were black holes there from the bang or were they formed. Perhaps they even both occurred at the same time.
Maybe something like that. You have to kill a lot of angular momentum so that most of the galaxies' matter can fall into the centre. Maybe two contra-rotating galaxies with nearly equal but opposite angular momentum approaching each other very slowly (relatively speaking) down a common axis of rotation, leading to a merged one with almost no angular momentum?
I imagine that the astronomers are busy running lots of simulations, trying to work out how it happened, or whether it's physically impossible (under current accepted physics) rather than merely unlikely. The biggest anything is almost always unlikely. and there are a LOT of observable galaxies.
"17 billion times the size of Sun" should evidently read "17 billion times the mass of Sun".
The SIZE of black hole can be conveniently (but only approximately) described with the Schwarzschild radius (which, amazingly, depends linearly on the mass, instead of, you know, only on the cube root of the mass).
We have:
3.38147 × 10^40 kilograms x 1.485 x 10^-27 m/kg ~ 5 x 10^13 m ~ 333 Astronomical Units.
That's about 12 times the orbit of Pluto. Damn.
Volume of a sphere = 4/3*Pi*r^3
1 AU = 149,597,871 km
r = 333AU = 49,816,091,043 km
Olympic Swimming pool volume = >2,500m^3
Volume = 5.1784233056683328044188335230758 * 10^32 km^3 = 5.1784233056683328044188335230758 * 10^41m3 =
2.0713693222673331217675334092303 *10^38 Olympic Swimming pools.
Well, it's hard to calculate the mass-density of the observable universe exactly, but it's in a very narrow band of all the possibilities. Slightly higher, and the universe would have collapsed back into a singularity (or at least a very small very hot entity) so long ago, that planets and life could never have formed. Slightly lower, and the universe would have expanded so far and so fast that there would be no stars, galaxies, planets or life, just a very thin soup of particles very close to absolute zero.
Hence to the weak antrhopic principle (for atheists) or the hand of $DEITY (for the religious).
Black holes betray their presence by their gravitational influence on the things around them. It's doubtless the odd nature of this galaxy that lets us deduce that the black hole at its centre is a monster, just as "ordinary" galaxies let us deduce the presence of an "ordinary" galactic-centre-sized black hole. So unless monster black holes can be lurking all alone in intergalactic voids (how?), they can't be the dark matter we are looking for. And anyway, we need a dark matter halo to make gravitationally bound galaxies work at all, and then there's the Bullet galaxy where two galaxies have collided head-on and one can observe the separation of the formerly-associated dark matter.
Shouldn't one always expect the biggest of anything to be an outlier, an anomaly, a bit of a freak? Unless it's difficult to concoct any scenario leading to the formation of this monster, one should surely assume that the observable universe is large enough for even very unlikely things to have happened somewhere.
And of course, the biggest is also the one shouting loudest for our attention. (Well, apart from Gamma-ray bursts, whatever they may be! )
"What's more, the discovery doesn’t seem to be a freak of nature. The team surveying black holes has found five other galaxies with similar characteristics"
"Eight months ago, the team discovered a black hole that could be as large as 30 billion solar masses (though that's unconfirmed)."
Source - The "Astronomers find biggest black hole, 17 BILLION times the size of Sun" Article.
Goofballs don't even know what gravity is or why it works. It acts instantaneously across the Universe. None of that speed of light throttling, not for our bellicose "gravitons", no sir. Einstein kludges up the "fabric of space-time" fairy tale and the number crunchers go into a century long phlogiston orgasm making John Holmes look like a cross-eyed hamster by comparison. WE ARE the "black hole" and the grant funded cardinals and bishops are working us like a twenty dollar convention hooker.
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