A Just-Right Black Hole Fills A Cosmic Void

[CraigD]

The universe doesn't do medium. In terms of what turns heads, you're either very, very big (think galactic clusters) or very, very small (think neutrinos and bosons). That's long been assumed to be the rule for black holes too. For 30 years, astronomers have been looking for evidence of a theorized class of black hole that would be sort of a cosmic middle child, falling somewhere between the well-established smaller ones — which are "only" 30 times the mass of our sun — and the supermassive types that are the equivalent of millions of solar masses.

 

Read more at This 7/9/2012 Times Science article by Dan Cray.

 

If this story's not cool enough just for the mention of the recently (13 June 2012) launched NuStar space x-ray telescope (which though the article fails to mention it, was launched by an aircraft-carried Pegasus-XL light launch vehicle), it has some immediate bearing on an ongoing Alternative Theories thread, What If Black Holes Existed Before The Big Bang?.

[Deepwater6]

Can you clear something up for me CraigD? In one sense the article seems to hint that a BH's size is directly porportionate to the size of the star/supernova that created it, but it also speaks of black holes starting small and going through different stages of maturation to get to super massive status. Which is more likely?

[Lancewen]

 

The universe doesn't do medium. In terms of what turns heads, you're either very, very big (think galactic clusters) or very, very small (think neutrinos and bosons). That's long been assumed to be the rule for black holes too. For 30 years, astronomers have been looking for evidence of a theorized class of black hole that would be sort of a cosmic middle child, falling somewhere between the well-established smaller ones — which are "only" 30 times the mass of our sun — and the supermassive types that are the equivalent of millions of solar masses.

 

Read more at This 7/9/2012 Times Science article by Dan Cray.

 

If this story's not cool enough just for the mention of the recently (13 June 2012) launched NuStar space x-ray telescope (which though the article fails to mention it, was launched by an aircraft-carried Pegasus-XL light launch vehicle), it has some immediate bearing on an ongoing Alternative Theories thread, What If Black Holes Existed Before The Big Bang?.

 

Proving that BH's have a life cycle is one of the corner stones of belief in BH's existing before the BB. The reason I can say this is because such a life cycle would be so long in time scale that the birth and death of our local universe would be but an eye blink by comparison. So what do you call our local universe when all the star fuel has been used up and all the stars are dark? It's a collection of hundreds of billions of dark galaxies, each with a great deal of dark mass in orbit around a supermassive BH. Just because there are no active lit up stars doesn't mean the BH's are not going about business as usual.

 

My next point is that BH's have an average growth rate, that can probably be calculated. I believe this growth rate takes place over time frames that measure in the hundreds of billions or trillions of years. In other words growth is rather slow compared to other celestial time scales we are used to working with. As a result of that personal theory, I believe the link below proves my point. It's not possible for two multi billion solar mass BH's to have formed so soon after the BB (about one billion years). If you like Occam's razor, the simplest solution is that those BH's existed before the BB.

 

http://www.nature.com/news/record-breaking-black-holes-fill-a-cosmic-gap-1.9553

[CraigD]

Can you clear something up for me CraigD? In one sense the article seems to hint that a BH's size is directly porportionate to the size of the star/supernova that created it, but it also speaks of black holes starting small and going through different stages of maturation to get to super massive status. Which is more likely?

What’s proposed is that both happen: single stars collapse into stellar mass black holes, and these BHs grow over time.

 

We know with pretty good certainty that there are both stellar mass BHs, and “supermassive” ones on the order of 1,000,000 to 1,000,000,000 times as massive. We’ve a pretty good model of the collapse of the remnant of single star massing at least about 4 [imath]M_{\odot}[/imath] (solar masses) in a supernova to leave a stellar mass BH. We’ve got strong theoretical reason, matched by observation, to believe no star can be larger than about 300 [imath]M_{\odot}[/imath].

 

That leaves us with the question of how SMBHs formed, since they can’t have formed from supernovas of 1000000+ [imath]M_{\odot}[/imath] stars, because there are no such things. The obvious answer is that stellar mass BHs gain mass by consuming various cosmic debris, including other stars and BHs. If this is the case, we should be able to find lots of BHs between single star mass and supermassive.

 

That’s exactly what various astronomers and astrophysicists believe they’re discovering, and what NuStar should be especially good at discovering and confirming.

 

It’s exciting stuff :)

[Deepwater6]

Your correct this age of discovery is very exciting. The NuStar telescope should yield some great information. We are also witnessing breakthroughs in space delivery systems. The Pegasus-XL as you mentioned and the Skylon vehicle you had mentioned in another thread

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skylon_%28spacecraft%29