Astronomers Discover a New Kind of Cosmic Object: a Black Hole 'Star' (theguardian.com) 18
Astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope say they may have found a new class of object: a "black hole star," in which a black hole is wrapped in dense gas and radiates in ways that resemble an enormous star. The Guardian reports: The international team made the breakthrough after focusing their attention on a mysterious red spot in images of the early universe captured by Nasa's James Webb space telescope. The object was lurking in the constellation of Cetus, the Whale, billions of light years from Earth. It is thought to have formed 660m years after the big bang, astronomers' leading theory as to how the universe began. Measurements of the exotic body found that while it resembles an immense star, it releases 100bn times more energy than any known star can produce. The energy output is far closer to that observed from black holes than stars. The findings have been published in the journal Nature.
Not sure this is a new discovery (Score:5, Funny)
Soundgarden wrote a song about this all the way back in '94.
Re: Not sure this is a new discovery (Score:2)
Theyâ(TM)ve been hypothesised for a long time. Actually finding that little red dots actually are them, ⦠no, thatâ(TM)s not been a thing since 1994.
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The only decent song they wrote.
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Black hole star
You're so far
And very very bright
What a light
What a light
What a light
I think that's how it went anyway
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I was hoping to find a Soundgarden reference here... thanks for restoring my faith in Slashdot (at least a little)!
Missing mass (Score:4, Informative)
A solar mass scale black hole would be unable to grow that quickly, even if surrounded by gas. It differs from a quasar, some of the brightest objects in the visible universe created by a feeding black hole and studied for decades, mostly from the surrounding gas being spherical and acting as a radiator of the internal heat as opposed to an accretion disk and relatively open space otherwise.
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Perhaps the answer is that the "Big Bang" wasn't the first, and these black holes are left over from a prior "universe". In that case, though, why are they so close together.
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For me the visualization of direct collapse black hole formation is that there's still a huge mass of gas falling in, at the boundary of the new black hole nearly dense enough to direct collapse itself. The blowback would compress the inflow over the density edge and you get a whole cloud of black holes.
They are getting older (Score:3)
It seems that 'the earliest Black Holes' (as observed by our increasingky accurate telescopes) are getting older and older, but are they really?
For extremely distant objects we rely on the Red Shift to calculate the distance (and therefore age)
But large black holes also have extreme gravity to incease the red shift of radia.ted electromagnetic waves.
In fact by definition the red shift of something at the event horizon is infinite.
Maybe we should take those 'age' indications with a grain of salt, especially as Sodium and Chlorine haven't had time to be fused yet.
Re:They are getting older (Score:4, Interesting)
But large black holes also have extreme gravity
But do they really? They have greater mass. But the Schwarzschild radius is (sort of) defined by that distance from an object's center where the escape velocity is equal to the speed of light. And that is what we think about when we say "gravity". So this value should be the same at the "surface" of every black hole.
If this is the case, then the effects occuring near this surface would be the same for all black holes, given an identical height above it. And given that, we would have trouble picking apart a redshift due to extreme distance (Hubble) from that caused by events close to that surface (gravitational red shift).
So if we can't really tell how far away it is, we can't reliably estimate its energy level.
Re: They are getting older (Score:3)
We're not looking at the black hole itself, but at the material around it, much of which is far enough from the "extreme gravity" that astrophysicists are not unreasonable in thinking that they have a pretty good handle on what's going on.
The reason we're discovering increasingly older objects in space is mostly just that we're getting increasingly sensitive instruments, and we're getting better at using them.
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We're also discovering unceasingly dim objects that are closer. They just don't get the same news coverage. But I'm more interested in wandering planets and planetoids (and even Oort belt objects).
Still not exciting (Score:1)
Just wait until they discover a black hole sun [youtube.com]
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Thank you! I came here to say this. :^)
Made me think of Soundgarden's song (Score:1)
Black Hole Sun [youtube.com]
Kurzgesagt did it! (Score:3)
Kurzgesagt did a great video on these things a few years back. It's cool that we've actually found one.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Wizard (Score:3)
It's pretty cool that they're seeing where the supermassive black holes come from. The models of what's happening in there must be amazing.