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JWST spots giant black holes all over the early universe

quantamagazine.org

121–130 of 186 posts

Re: JWST spots giant black holes all over the early universe

#121
post #112

The density of black hole decrease by the inverse square of the mass of the black hole. That means massive black holes have a much lower density that small black holes. So they are more likely to form than small black holes. Dark matter will have played an important role in the creation of those early black holes. If there is no dark matter and some form of MOND theory of gravity is correct, the Schwarzschild formula…

What exactly is the "density" of a black hole?

As I understand, a BH is a singularity, so all mass is at one point which means all BHs have the same (infinite) density.

Is it a kind of "virtual density", e.g. the mass of the singularity devided by the schwarzschild radius or the event horizon?

Re: JWST spots giant black holes all over the early universe

#122
post #112

The density of black hole decrease by the inverse square of the mass of the black hole. That means massive black holes have a much lower density that small black holes. So they are more likely to form than small black holes. Dark matter will have played an important role in the creation of those early black holes. If there is no dark matter and some form of MOND theory of gravity is correct, the Schwarzschild formula…

>So they are more likely to form than small black holes.

This certainly does not follow from the rest of your comment. I'm pretty sure it's false.

Re: JWST spots giant black holes all over the early universe

#123
post #121
post #112

The density of black hole decrease by the inverse square of the mass of the black hole. That means massive black holes have a much lower density that small black holes. So they are more likely to form than small black holes. Dark matter will have played an important role in the creation of those early black holes. If there is no dark matter and some form of MOND theory of gravity is correct, the Schwarzschild formula…

What exactly is the "density" of a black hole? As I understand, a BH is a singularity, so all mass is at one point which means all BHs have the same (infinite) density. Is it a kind of "virtual density", e.g. the mass of the singularity devided by the schwarzschild radius or the event horizon?

Density is mass divided by volume. Volume of BH is defined by event horizon.

Singularity is a result of applying a theory of relativity in a case where we know relativity doesn't work, so it's unlikely it's real.

Re: JWST spots giant black holes all over the early universe

#124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So from a classical point of view light travels as a wave but interact as a particle. And the classical point of view is wrong . Photons resemble classical particles in a few respects, and classical waves in a few others, but at the end of the day they're neither. > Still the point stands that we never observe light directly but only through its effects on electrons and other charged particles. This is true of lite…

photons dont exist, dude, except in connection with and at the site of the detector. study some qft and then you can go talk about it on the internet with authority. and yes direct observation exists. that's what measurement is. and that's all you can ever "observe" unless you incorporate the wavefunction, which also doesn't "exist".

This comment is needlessly hostile. It's ok to correct someone if you think they're wrong, but this tone isn't conducive to curious conversation.

Re: JWST spots giant black holes all over the early universe

#125
post #112

The density of black hole decrease by the inverse square of the mass of the black hole. That means massive black holes have a much lower density that small black holes. So they are more likely to form than small black holes. Dark matter will have played an important role in the creation of those early black holes. If there is no dark matter and some form of MOND theory of gravity is correct, the Schwarzschild formula…

>So they are more likely to form than small black holes. This certainly does not follow from the rest of your comment. I'm pretty sure it's false.

They may have included the effect of black hole evaporation here? Small black holes evaporates much quicker and won't survive.

Re: JWST spots giant black holes all over the early universe

#126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>So they are more likely to form than small black holes. This certainly does not follow from the rest of your comment. I'm pretty sure it's false.

They may have included the effect of black hole evaporation here? Small black holes evaporates much quicker and won't survive.

I guess, but even a solar mass black hole would take 10^64 years to evaporate

Re: JWST spots giant black holes all over the early universe

#127
post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is worth considering that a black hole's hold on its galaxy is not as strong as a sun-like star's on its accretion disk. Our Sun is 99% of the mass of the solar system, our Sagittarius A* is ~4 million solar masses, while our Milky Way is 800 billion solar masses. On top of that, black hole growth rate slows to nearly a stop at ~270 billion solar masses, so even if a black hole manages to meet the rare conditions…

But at the same time, I think it's been shown the the size of a galaxy almost always reflects the size of its central black hole... that is, the influence of the central black hole seems to be way, way bigger than what you would expect from the black hole's gravity alone.

That doesn't follow. A galaxy is not like a star system that orbits a single massive object in a single plane. Objects orbit the center of mass of the galaxy, which is made of of an enormous mass of stars and clouds of dust and gas.

For example, the central molecular zone (CMZ) is an asymmetrical roughly spherical region, about 1600-1900 light years in diameter, that contains about 60 million solar masses of gas and dust alone, not counting the stars in that region.

That's 15 times heavier than the central black hole, or put another way, the black hole is less than 6% of its mass. By contrast, the Sun is more than 99% of the mass in the solar system - the planets are rounding errors by comparison. With the central black hole, it's the other way around.

And that CMZ gas is only about 5% of the gas in the galaxy. There's over 26,000 light years between us and the black hole, and every star and gas cloud in that enormous volume exerts a gravitational influence on us.

Zooming out a bit further, the galactic bulge is on the order of 15 billion solar masses, with a roughly spherical radius of about 6500 light years. The central black hole is less than 0.03% of that mass. If you want to imagine us and other stars in the spiral arms as orbiting a single central object, that bulge would be a better choice. But as I said, there's still another 23,000 light years between us and that bulge, filled with stars whose gravitational influence we feel.

If anything, causation is likely to work the other way around, in that larger galaxies have larger central black holes because they have denser central regions.

The questions that exist are more around how the central black hole affects galaxy formation, a sort of which came first question.

Re: JWST spots giant black holes all over the early universe

#128

Maybe I’m a bit naive here, but I thought finding of many supermassive back holes in the very early universe should be expected, and not a surprise. My chain of thoughts is following: - Blackholes are collapsed masses. In our phase of the universe, they are normally the results of supernovae but only because today stars are the only source of dense masses. - Because the total mass of the universe is constant and the…

Lets say the number of actual black holes is even more - several orders more than what is even mentioned here. Would it be enough to account for the "Dark Matter" conundrum ?

Look up the "MACHO" hypothesis for dark matter. Tl;dr: mostly ruled out via gravitational lensing surveys.

Re: JWST spots giant black holes all over the early universe

#129
post #3

This is super cool. I think it's funny how Quanta writes, "It is expected because JWST was built, in part, to find the ancient objects." "Ancient" is equivalent to "distant" because of special relativity. It's an odd thing, astronomy - it's a real world time-traveling observation, except we're limited in resolution and we can't look here only there . If it was a game mechanic I'd call it a cunning way to impose inter…

> "Ancient" is equivalent to "distant" because of special relativity.

You don't need special relativity for that, all you need is a finite speed of light - a fact which was known before special relativity was developed.

Re: JWST spots giant black holes all over the early universe

#130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Scientist recently got a good picture of one

See, this is my beef with the reporting on this stuff and the source of my question. The "photo" you're referring to was constructed by a super computer massaging enormous amounts of data to fit a model and constructing an image from weighted averages of thousands of data images across the spectrum from an enormously complex array of detectors in an unfathomably noisy environment [1]. It was presented by the media as…

LISA is a scaled-up version of LIGO, and won't produce "photos" any more than LIGO does. Of course, LIGO has provided extremely good evidence that black holes exist (most of what it detects are the gravitational waves from two black holes merging), but if you don't buy that, then you won't buy LISA's observations, either.
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