Gigantic Black Holes Just Got Even Bigger

"Ultramassive black holes — that is, black holes with masses exceeding 10 billion solar masses — are probably not rare; several and even dozens of these colossal black holes may exist," study lead author Julie Hlavacek-Larrondo, an astrophysicist at Stanford University, told SPACE.com.

This is interesting.
Apparently it has been determined that some of the most massive supermassive black holes that have been discovered are much denser than previously thought.

Space.com

"Some of our black hole mass predictions are just lower limits, so they could be higher," Hlavacek-Larrondo said. "Just how big do I think they can get? I would bet that a least one 100-billion-solar-mass black hole exists among our objects, which really is ultra-big."

Oddly, these black holes are about 10 times larger than one would expect from the size of their host galaxies.

"These results may mean we don't really understand how the very biggest black holes coexist with their host galaxies," said study author Andrew Fabian of England's Cambridge University. "It looks like the behavior of these huge black holes has to differ from that of their less massive cousins in an important way."

I don't know about anyone else, but I think it is awesome that every time we think we have figured out something about how the universe works, we tend to end up with even more questions than we started with.

The answer to this mystery may have to do with where these black holes were discovered. All of these potentially ultramassive black holes lie in galaxies at the centers of massive galaxy clusters containing huge amounts of hot gas. Black holes probably generate the outbursts of energy that keep this hot gas from cooling and forming huge numbers of stars, researchers say.

We should be able to learn more about these big suckers once the James Webb Space Telescope gets launched in a few years. I'm excited about all the new stuff we'll learn once that thing is up and running.

What do you guys think?

It would be nice if we could send some kind of instrument inside of a black hole and 'hopefully' somehow still be able to observe it and what goes on the inside.

reply to post by TheProphetMark


I agree, I think that would be really cool.

I wonder if anyone is working on something like that. I think it's worth a shot at least.

reply to post by watchitburn


Hasn't it also been theorized that we're living inside of a Black Hole?

reply to post by lostbook


What about that our 3d world is really a hologram projected off the black hole in the center of our galaxy.

The hologram theory is very intriguing.

Thanks for the thread OP! S&F

Link for a cool article on Holographic Universe:www.wired.com...