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Article triggers critical mass of pedantry on HN, thread collapses in on itself
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I hadn't heard of the distinction stellar or non-stellar black hole before. It rather sounds like semantics to me to say this is one type of black hole and not another when it's physically the same thing and we don't know how it formed to begin with The headline confused me as well: 33 solar masses (not sizes) seems tiny to me, I was sure we knew of bigger ones
To add to a sibling comment, the distinction is important, because observed mass of black holes falls largely into super massive (millions to billions solar masses) to stellar (dozens of solar masses). There is very, very, astonishingly few observed black holes with an intermediate mass. So, how super massive black holes form is a mystery, and finding large stellar mass black holes starts filling in (possibly) that e…
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> probably ranging in size to tinier than a period (.) "Probably" is a strong word, these are very hypothetical, the lightest observed black hole has a mass of 3 Suns.
A three solar mass black hole is still only ~13km across. Not full-stop-sized, but closer to that than the diameter of the sun.
Admittedly, it gets a bit philosophical. The sphere of no return isn't the thing, but it might as well be for any outside observer, but it isn't, but it could be viewed as such, but... :) Suffice to say I'm glad the closest thing to black holes I have to contend with in my daily life is a 2+ million line php codebase dating from the late Clinton administration.
For a related visualization about size/mass of suns and black holes: I Put 4M Suns in a Black Hole over New York [video] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pDUUT2Y_9qk ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39735510 )
Does every galaxy have a super massive black hole at the Center?
Article triggers critical mass of pedantry on HN, thread collapses in on itself
Yes. It is kinda amazing to observe (as a professional astrophysicist) how people manage to find small (mostly irrelevant) things to nitpick instead of discussing a really interesting discovery.
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That doesn't matter, you are toying with semantics. If astronomers say stellar black hole, they don't mean supermassive black holes at galactic centers. Even if Sagittarius A* was initially a stellar black hole, its more now.
I hadn't heard of the distinction stellar or non-stellar black hole before. It rather sounds like semantics to me to say this is one type of black hole and not another when it's physically the same thing and we don't know how it formed to begin with The headline confused me as well: 33 solar masses (not sizes) seems tiny to me, I was sure we knew of bigger ones
While it's possible that supermassive black holes were formed from stellar collapse, there are models where they didn't, while they _know_ that this one was formed from stellar collapse.
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Also “33 times more massive than the sun” means 34 times the mass of the sun.
Oh boy, this sent me down a memory lane. I remember arguing long and hard with my math teacher in elementary school that "two times as massive" and "two times more massive than" are not the same thing, but she did not agree. That's the point where I learned that the grownup world is weird and sometimes it's easier to just smile and nod.
Even pointing out the Nile didn't change her mind; I imagine there's a denial joke to be made there.
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Yes, but the size is not proportional to the suns mass, hence the error. size=/=mass
Also “33 times more massive than the sun” means 34 times the mass of the sun.
for me "more X" and "Xer" are the same thing, so I don't get your system
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because of the image’s inaccuracy, masqueraded as something one of our telescopes could visualize, but instead is a contrived make-work programme
Yet it will be replaced with another job to generate even less accurate images. It reminds me of a hilarious article Josh barrow wrote about the SV bank run. He uses AI article art for a bank run, which ended up as 6 fingered joggers along the bank of a river.
they can all do accurate hands now
and what OpenAI’s working on understands physics
I think this undermines the point you were aiming for