Fascinating!
Great boffinry.
I wish I understood it. Only 800,000 years? Seems like a blink!
Blast from the past: Mass birth of early supermassive black holes explained at last
The earliest supermassive black holes have always puzzled astronomers. These ancient voids – about a billion times the mass of the Sun – were discovered more than a decade ago and formed only 800,000 years after the Big Bang. It should take millions of years for black holes to accumulate that much mass, so finding these giants …
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Tuesday 14th March 2017 11:07 GMT CrazyOldCatMan
Re: "Only 800,000 years? Seems like a blink!"
Yes, it's amazing that Muse could produce a semi-decent album in that time, isn't it?
As a primarily-prog-person I really ought to like Muse (they are, after all, somewhere on the Prog spectrum - rather more to the 'rock' end than the 'prog' end though.).
Sadly, the lead singers voice gives me a reaction somewhat akin to fingernails on a blackboard. I have one album in iTunes - it has one listen to one track..
I'll just have to stick to the other 150GB of prog. Maybe one day I'll add a second track.
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Wednesday 15th March 2017 10:27 GMT Tom Paine
Re: "Only 800,000 years? Seems like a blink!"
Old school progger here (*makes the secret sign of the 1972 Cabal) and I also completely failed to get Muse. No accounting for taste, obviously the people who like it are hearing something I'm missing, but *shrug*.
Now, Radiohead on the other hand,..
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Tuesday 14th March 2017 13:40 GMT Tom 38
@Symon
The article you linked to says that
...you have to remember: 13.8 billion years ago, our entire observable Universe was smaller than the size of our Solar System is today!
and then has a chart of universe age versus universe radius size in light years...
I don't see what inflation has to do with this either; inflation lasted for a fraction of a second after the big bang, this is talking about effects well after that.
What am I missing?
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Wednesday 15th March 2017 10:21 GMT Tom Paine
Now I'm no phyicist, gods know, but...
..the earliest supermassive black holes have always puzzled astronomers. These ancient voids – about a billion times the mass of the Sun..."
Unless I've completely misunderstood everything I've seen and read about black holes, they're points of effectively infinite density, often surrounded by dense clouds of gas and plasma radiating wildly due to the intense pressure and gravity just outside the event horizon. Isn't that the exact opposite of a void?
(PS finally, an opportunity to use precisely the right icon! \o/ )
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Wednesday 15th March 2017 11:08 GMT mhenriday
Rare ?
«Another previous paper led by Eli Visbal, co-author of the current study and researcher at Columbia University, calculated that the neighbor galaxy would have to be at least 100 million times more massive than the Sun to emit enough radiation to prevent star formation in the host galaxy.
Giant galaxies of that size are relatively rare.»
Are they really so rare ? The mass of our own galaxy, the Milky Way has a mass estimated to be some 0.8–1.5×10¹² solar masses, while that of our closest neighbouring galaxy is estimated to be some 1.5×10¹² solar masses. Even the Large Magellanic Cloud, a so-called dwarf galaxy orbiting our own, is estimated to have a mass some 10¹⁰ solar masses. Is the quote above off by several orders of magnitude ?...
Henri
Biting the hand that feeds IT
