Hundreds of black holes discovered far, far away

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Hundreds of black holes discovered far, far away
ALAN FISCHER
Tucson Citizen



The discovery of hundreds of massive black holes could help better explain the formation of our galaxy, a Tucson astronomer involved in the research said.

Working with X-ray, infrared and visible light telescopes, researchers found the huge, growing black holes in galaxies billions of light years from Earth, said Mark Dickinson, an astronomer with the National Optical Astronomy Observatory in Tucson.

The black holes, which are 9 billion to 11 billion light years away and existed when the universe was 2.5 billion to 4.5 billion years old, he said. Our galaxy is 13.5 billion years old.

"We're looking at the teenage years of the galaxies - the boom years when the galaxies were growing the most," he said.

Galaxies, including the Milky Way, have massive black holes in the middle of them, Dickinson said. Astronomers are able to detect energy from materials being sucked into black holes because the materials heat up as they enter.

"Most black holes are not eating anything right now," he said. "The energy coming out is very low."

The newly discovered black holes' galaxies are very active, growing quickly and pumping out lots of energy, he said.

"We're trying to look back in time and see how galaxies grow and their black holes grow," he said. "What we are seeing is what was a typical turbulent youth for galaxies like our own."

Researchers discovered the black holes while investigating unexplained high-energy X-rays, he said.

Using data collected from an arsenal of telescope technology - including X-ray, infrared and visible light - astronomers confirmed the presence of the black holes, Dickinson said.

Dickinson led the infrared segment of the investigation using NASA's Spitzer space telescope, and is co-author of two new papers on the subject that will appear in the Nov. 10 issue of The Astrophysical Journal.

Emanuel Daddi, the project's lead researchers, worked on the investigation while working at NOAO in Tucson before moving to the Commissariat a l'Energie Atomique in France a year ago.

It always amazes me that we can actually look back in time.

Yes. Overwhelming evidence of the immutability and universality of natural law. My biggest question, besides how did this all get started in the first place, is where does all that stuff go that falls into black holes. Black holes grow, so maybe they're just giant trash compactors. But theory says there's more to them than what doesn't meet the eye. They could be worm hole portals.

I've heard that they slowly loose mass over time in the form of radiation. It's sort of like how the sun looses mass over time through electromagnetic radiation.

It seems as if galaxies form in very much the same way as solar systems form only instead of forming around a star they form around a black hole.

I've heard that, but I don't understand how they can they loose mass in the form of radiation if the gravity is so strong, nothing can radiate out of it? It's gravity is so strong that space is warped past light speed and time "stops" (or is reversed?).

^Yes, that's the discovery that put Stephen Hawking on the map. The effect is called Hawking Radiation, and although it's not been observed, it's still a theory, it is widely accepted because no one has been able to disprove Hawking's initial equations. I read a book entitled Time Travel in Einstein's Universe: The Physical Possibilities of Travel Through Time by Richard Gott, an astrophysicist from Princeton where he described the theoretical idea of HR very well. It's actually a really cool book if you were ever a Sci Fi fan as a kid (or still are, like me), and got into time-travel stories.

Eventually, according to Hawking's theory, the black holes will eat up everything in the universe, they will then eat each other - accumulating like droplets of mercury from T-1000 - until there is just one massive black hole comprising the entire mass of the universe. This giant will slowly eat itself alive as it wastes away to nothing. A rather bleak future, but so far - the only mathematically predicted one.

From wikipedia...

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Hawking showed that quantum effects allow black holes to emit exact black body radiation, which is the average thermal radiation emitted by an idealized thermal source known as a black body. The radiation is as if it is emitted by a black body of temperature which is related (inverse proportional) to the black hole's mass.

Physical insight on the process may be gained by imagining that particle-antiparticle radiation is emitted from just beyond the event horizon. This radiation does not come directly from the black hole itself, but rather is a result of virtual particles being "boosted" by the black hole's gravitation into becoming real particles.

A more precise, but still much simplified view of the process is that vacuum fluctuations cause a particle-antiparticle pair to appear close to the event horizon of a black hole. One of the pair falls into the black hole whilst the other escapes. In order to preserve total energy, the particle which fell into the black hole must have had a negative energy (with respect to an observer far away from the black hole). By this process the black hole loses mass, and to an outside observer it would appear that the black hole has just emitted a particle.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawking_radiation

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This radiation does not come directly from the black hole itself, but rather is a result of virtual particles being "boosted" by the black hole's gravitation into becoming real particles.

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vacuum fluctuations

?

I'm sorry, but if those are supposed to be down to my level, he/they failed. I haven't trusted Hawking since he tried to show what came before the Big Bang.

Is there any theories out there about after all the black holes eat up the universe that it will become the same conditions as the big bang and start all over again? Also, if time can reverse in them is it possible that when the whole universe is a black hole that time reverses back to the original big bang? If that is possible maybe what existed before the big bang was this universe and after the end of this universe this universe will be born again. The past could be the future and the future could be the past. It could be a big loop where I am forced to live this life over and over again for all of eternity and that would explain my constant deja vu. I shouldn't of took all that acid! I'm scared I crossed over to The Twilight Zone! God help us!

Could be.