51 Replies to “It’s Probably Nothing”

  3. There is nothing extremely remarkable about this. Supermassive black holes are thought to occur in the centres of every spiral galaxy, and probably in elliptical galaxies as well. Ours is relatively small, and about 4 million solar masses. The most powerful quasars are probably powered by billion solar mass black hole. This pushes the limit up but only by about 60%.
    Inflow of gas and dust into these supermassive black holes (it is most unlikely that they form from single massive stars, unlike smaller black holes) is thought to explain quasars and radio galaxies, which are the most powerful energy sources in the cosmos. Nearer related phenomena are objects such as Seifert galaxies. It is thought that these are less powerful because they have ingested most of the available gas and dust. Even the neighbourhood of our own galactic centre, SgrA*, is quite active, and if we were to gather up all the AGWers, all the Marxists, and all the NsDaPers, and fire them into it, we might really see a flareup.
    Yes, there is a huge monster near you, and it wants to eat YOU!

  4. Maybe the black holes will suck the excess CO2 out of the atmosphere and keep the greenies at the UN climate change conference happy. Oh wait, nothing makes them happy…

  12. Howie….dang…you beat me to it…how about the NDPeers,the Lieberals,any and all commies/facists/marxists etc.
    Amd yes,troll. That IS capitalism.If you are stupid enough to go to them,then you fail.See, capitalism and Darwin’s evolution work on the same lines…only the strong and smart survive. And BTW,they are now called Western Union!

  13. Black holes are caused by Human beings. Particularly Western democracies.Just ask the UN.

  16. Should be big enough to suck in those inter-galactic busybodies on their way to destroy us for not worshipping gaia properly (because gaia/terra/mother earth is so prominent in the universe).

  19. Actually, it’s a false alarm. An ice comet was passing in front of the Hubble at the time, and it simply reflected back an image of Washington, DC.

  20. One million earths would fit inside the sun. I’m going to spare myself the math as to how many earths would fit inside these big black buggers, but…..holy crap, that’s huge!!!

  21. Spock was correct-
    There is a large monster planet/galaxy sucker coming right at us..
    Beam me up Scottie..

  23. “False alarm, Michael Moore’s ass got stuck in another swivel chair.
    Posted by: richfisher”
    Good one, rfisher! LMAO!

  25. Eskimo, by definition, a blaok hole or collapsar has no volume at all. It’s in a perpetual state of implosion. The volume of a black hole is usually defined by the area of the static limit, that point at which matter vanishes from the universe and light can no longer escape.

  27. At 10 billion solar masses, these things weigh 10^36kg. For some perspective, the unfunded US national debt by 2020 will be 14 trillion, that is 1.4×10^13 dollars, bit more than one third the size, give or take a few orders of magnitude.
    What? It was the biggest number I could think of.

  29. It will turn out that our whole planetary system is just a single sperm on something elses bed sheet. Apparently the laundry will be done Dec.21 2012.

  33. cgh
    static limit,…or event horizon
    and Hawking now, after postulating in the 70T’s to the negative, believes at SOME particle DO escape the event horizon, the scientific community has named these theoretical escapees , Hawking particles

  40. Some years ago, they were selling T shirts at Berkley that said, ‘black holes are outta sight’

  41. Gym, yes indeed, but so far it’s just theory without any real evidence one way or another. A fascinating piece of science to watch over the next dozen years or so.

  42. cgh says, “Gym, yes indeed, but so far it’s just theory without any real evidence one way or another”, which is correct (and important to remember), in one way. However, there is a body of phenomena which can readily be explained by black hole models and not very well by anything else. These include intense emission of electromagnetic radiation and particles from nonresoluble volumes (as with certain Chandra observations), variability on time scales down to millisecond but with little or no periodicity, and so forth. We can refer to these as “phenomenological black holes.” The connection between the phenomenological black hole and the theoretical black hole (technically the Schwarzschild metric and the Kerr metric) is not solid – the smoking pistol is elusive.

  43. “Nevermind the physical size, I wondering what the mass would be.
    Posted by: ChrisinMB at December 5, 2011 1:21 PM”
    The physical size is infinitesimally small, the journalists misread “size” to mean “physical size.” The mass is 10 billion times the sun, the size is extremely small, hence why these are so dense. If it were 10 billion times the physical size of the sun, the density would be laughable.
    Journalists….

  45. What’s wrong with you people? – black holes aren’t funny … ok, maybe a little bit funny … ok, they’re pretty funny. But that’s no reason to make fun of them.

  47. They’re 300 million light years away.
    You all had me worried that they were going to show up, like, next week or something.

  48. Dante
    These journalists confuse mass with physical size…an aspect which does not relate to black holes which in practice have massive mass but little or no physical size….hence their density and massive gravitational field.
    What occurs at the core is purely speculation…it has been put about that to compress matter that much will result in reactions well beyond fusion.
    In fact it is speculated that these black holes inevitable vacuum up all the matter in the universe and then are mutually attracted to fuse and become a “singularity(s)” explode (BIG BANG) and start the whole process up again….
    Due to time and prodigeous distance, these considerations in practical terms resemble the medieval debates about angels and pin heads….
    The dog wants in….

  50. Talk of “black holes” is racist. I’m appalled that this report was not properly edited so as to read “African-American holes”.

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