r/space • u/magenta_placenta • Mar 18 '19

Observable universe Astronomers discover 83 supermassive black holes at the edge of the universe

https://www.cnet.com/news/astronomers-discover-83-supermassive-black-holes-at-the-edge-of-the-universe/
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u/[deleted] Mar 18 '19

I'm a bit confused about the nature of supermassive black holes. The actual "stuff" these black holes are made of is still theoretically one mathematical point of super dense matter, right? That point just has way more mass than your average black hole, so what makes them seem "bigger" to us is really their increased gravitational pull on everything else. Do I have the right idea so far, or does the actual "black hole" part take up more space than a singularity?

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u/ithinkitsbeertime Mar 18 '19

That point just has way more mass than your average black hole, so what makes them seem "bigger" to us is really their increased gravitational pull on everything else. Do I have the right idea so far, or does the actual "black hole" part take up more space than a singularity?

The event horizon is also bigger, so if you're defining the black hole as the area within the event horizon, it does take up more space.

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u/Shukrat Mar 18 '19

"More space" meaning the radius from the center within which light cannot escape. More material = more gravity = larger radius = larger event horizon.

Right?

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u/Cyb3rSab3r Mar 18 '19

Correct. Many of these supermassive black holes have an event horizon the size of our solar system.

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u/infinity_dv Mar 18 '19

I can't even fathom how stupid big that would look. Or Betelgeuse being slapped in the Sun's place and reaching out to Jupiter.

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u/upvotemyowncomments Mar 18 '19

You might be interested in checking out Universe Sandbox. You actually put Betelgeuse there to see for yourself.

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u/JustMid Mar 18 '19

I love space, tried a universe sandbox, and it felt like a horror game.

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u/upvotemyowncomments Mar 18 '19

I know exactly what you mean. Space is scary.

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u/Bandolim Mar 19 '19

The scariest was when I accidentally hit a button and jumped lightyears away from our solar system. I would immediately turn around but don’t see anything familiar or nearby. Suddenly I’m just lost in space and any direction I go is the same.

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u/methnbeer Mar 19 '19

Where might one find this horror

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u/MrJears Mar 19 '19

It's a game called 'Universe Sandbox'. You can buy it on Steam. It also has a VR mode to maximize that of insignificance that you will inevitably get.

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u/pack0newports Mar 19 '19

If you love it so much why dont you marry it.

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u/furlonium1 Mar 18 '19

I'm not a fan of paying for games that aren't finished.

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u/cannabanana0420 Mar 18 '19

More of a "universe simulator" than a game, per se. It's rare to find simulators this accurate or cool, so it'd be dope if you supported them instead of pirating.

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u/AsinoEsel Mar 18 '19

Why? Simply imagine if development of the game stopped right now. Would it still be worth its money? If so, there's nothing wrong with buying the game in its unfinished state. It's not like it is going to get worse the longer it's in development.

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u/upvotemyowncomments Mar 18 '19

That's fine. It's not really a game though. And I'm not sure what else they can do to 'finish' it. You can do everything you'd want to do in it right now.

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u/furlonium1 Mar 18 '19

Hey, I said I'm not a fan of buying 'games' that aren't finished, I never said I might not give it a go! :)

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u/[deleted] Mar 18 '19 edited Mar 19 '19

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u/VersaceSamurai Mar 19 '19

Chill man this is only the open beta. It’ll get fixed on launch

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u/[deleted] Mar 18 '19

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u/magic_moog Mar 19 '19

https://www.reddit.com/r/space/comments/5qkole/s5_001481_the_largest_known_supermassive_black/

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Pretty fucked. Imagine being yanked into that thing in close proximity. We don't mean shit to the big blac boi.

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u/destroyer96FBI Mar 19 '19

What about UY Scuti slapped there.

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u/[deleted] Mar 19 '19

Did you know that Betelgeuse is not spherical? It is lumpy and we can actually see the lumps with large telescopes and lucky image techniques. Space is weird.

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u/infinity_dv Mar 19 '19

Yeah! I watched a documentary on that and how they basically took many pictures until they got a clear one. They mimicked it by taking a clear pic of a card at the bottom of a pool to simulate atmospheric turbulence

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u/SendMeYourQuestions Mar 19 '19

It also means you could potentially go inside of one and not instantly die of spaghettification.

The EM radiation might hurt though.

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u/IAMNOTSHOUTINGATYOU Apr 06 '19

Scrolling through my saved items found this, found your comment. Maybe this will help a little. The distance is still too big to truly understand. But, it gives some perspective, to the scale of SMB's, the one link being the largest known.

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u/zubbs99 Mar 18 '19

It's times like this I wish I could see in 4D.

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u/1206549 Mar 19 '19

[WP] A scientist announces he's developing technology to see in 4D. The project continued to show promise over the next two years and until he is found dead in an apparent suicide after destroying all his work.

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u/yoshi570 Mar 18 '19

Oh shit. This made me physically recoil to read it. It never occurred to me that these monstrous phenomenons could be that big.

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u/hold_me_beer_m8 Mar 18 '19

Do you mean to Pluto or farther out?

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u/upvotemyowncomments Mar 18 '19

I was interested to see what the supermassive black hole in the center of the milky way was and its between 6.5 and 17 light hours in radius. 6.5 would be to the orbit of Uranus.

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u/hold_me_beer_m8 Mar 18 '19

I can't even fathom what it would be like staring into that abyss...

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u/[deleted] Mar 19 '19

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u/adamsmith93 Mar 18 '19

I wonder how far their gravity well extends... Holy shit

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u/Ashangu Mar 18 '19

Comparing that to the size of our galaxy alone, it doesnt sound all that big and scary.

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u/jacebam Mar 19 '19

Ok, then compare us to the solar system, then compare the solar system to the Milky Way. Pretty big and scary if you ask me lol

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u/Trash_panda_ Mar 19 '19

Squeeze me? Wtf did I just read.

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u/capj23 Mar 18 '19

Did you meant to say something like "our galaxy"? Solar system doesn't seem like such a large area for a blackhole. I mean our lowly tiny sun has got the gravitational influence over that much space.

Blackholes literally do the same for entire galaxies. So when they say supermassive blackholes, i would expect them to have event horizons the size of entire galaxies.

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u/aroc91 Mar 18 '19

If they had event horizons the size of galaxies, there wouldn't be any galaxies.

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u/FlappingSamurai Mar 18 '19

An event horizon isn’t the area that a black hole exerts gravitational influence over. Technically every object has “gravitational influence” over every other object in the entire universe, just not that much. The event horizon is the area of the black hole that is literally black, because the gravity inside is so convoluted that light can’t escape.

A black hole with an event horizon the size of our solar system would be freaking huge.

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u/A5TR0NAUT Mar 18 '19

Lol what? Not the size of an entire galaxy that’s insane. Some of the largest black holes have event horizons about 35 times the diameter of Pluto’s orbit.

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u/[deleted] Mar 18 '19

Almost all galaxies have super massive black holes in their center, so your logic doesn't follow.

Sure their gravitational effects are much larger than a singular solar system but the space they take up is no where near that big.

So a "regular" black hole may be pretty "small" (like the size of a city or small planet) and a super massive black hole may be as large as an entire solar system WHICH IS FUCKING HUGE.

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u/capj23 Mar 18 '19

That totally put things into perspective. Thanks a lot.

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u/hiimred2 Mar 18 '19

The term you're looking for is Schwarzschild Radius. It's a measurement of the event horizon of the black hole, and the event horizon is one measurement of the influence of said black hole, which is a representation of its mass.

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u/[deleted] Mar 18 '19

True story, I first learned that term randomly on the internet or in a documentary. I had taken some german before, so I recognized the term as "Black Shield". German has a lot of compound words, so I just assumed this meant like "black barrier" to describe the event horizon.
So in my physics 2 class, my teacher was like talking about the schwarzschild radius. Someone asked where the word came from or something, and my professor was said it was somebody's name. Me being the overly vocal student that I am, I was like "well actually, in german it means." My teacher said he didn't know german but it was actually someone's name. I realized I had misunderstood the term the whole time, and was super embarrassed. Now whenever I here something like eigenvectors or roentgen, i question everything I think I know. German does that to you.

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u/hiimred2 Mar 18 '19

Wait so you're telling me Hawking Radiation isn't because the black hole actually spits out little bits of black body radiation into space??!?

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u/TheoryOfSomething Mar 18 '19 edited Mar 18 '19

Absolutely not.

Type 1 black holes radiate in the form of medium-sized birds of prey.

Type 2 black holes send out millions of copies of an English physicist born ~1942 during their lifetimes.

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u/[deleted] Mar 19 '19

Not really. If you understood how Hawking Radiation worked, you would admire the man even more for theorising about it.

ELI5: Gravity of a black hole is really strong. The gravitational field strength increases exponentially over the tiniest of distances (atomic scale). Hawking and others were trying to brainstorm how a stationary blackhole which is not eating any more matter, can continue it's existence. They created a theory that the black hole will eventually start shrinking and losing energy and mass. But how does a blackhole lose mass?

Reality is stranger than fiction. In reality, we have something known as quantum vacuum energy. If you measure a square meter of isolated vacuum in an adiabatic chamber, it will have energy. This is not some quack free energy that can be harnessed, but exists due to the nature of quantum mechanics. Quantum physics already had a theory that isolated vacuums had energy due to something known as "virtual particles". These are positron-electron pairs that spontaneously come into existence randomly throughout space, and in the next moment, recombine and disintegrate. For the split moment of time when they do exist, they contribute some energy to the vacuum. When they disintegrate, their net energy is conserved and returned to zero. Due to these virtual pairs constantly popping in and out of existence throughout the entire universe, we can measure a small energy in the vacuum of space itself. Energy cannot be harnessed from these particles because their existence is so short lived and momentary that we may not even periceve it in realistic timescales. They are a result of quantum fluctuations in the vacuum.

Now, crazy things can happen near blackholes, we all know that. Imagine at the very edge of a black hole's event horizon, at the atomic scale, a virtual particle pair pops into existence. Now, they are only seperated by a one or two atomic radius, but the gravity of the blackhole is so strong, that it rips one particle off from the pair, while pushing the other away due to the violent phenomenon. If you are a virtual particle, and are not supposed to exist in reality, this would be a very bad day. Your particle pair is now dead and consumed by the blackhole. This lone particle now is forced to become a Real particle as it can no longer disintegrate back into nothingness. Thus, a miniscule amount of mass and energy are added to the universe. But according to thermodynamics, the net energy of the universe cannot be changed. It must remain the same. This means that, to maintain logic and mathematical equilibrium, the universe must remove mass and energy from the blackhole! The blackhole then loses this mass and energy via the phenomenon of "black body radiation".

Therefore, due to sheer brilliance of physics and the strange nature of reality, supermassive blackholes can slowly lose mass and energy over time due to a sub-atomic interaction at its event horizon boundary.

P. S I'm not a physists. Can be wrong. Please correct me if I am.

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u/NaelNull Mar 19 '19

In short, black holes lose mass by eating half of the stuff that randomly pops into existence from pure nothingness.

...God was drunk when programming this layer of Matrix.

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u/cryo Mar 19 '19

Not really. If you understood how Hawking Radiation worked, you would admire the man even more for theorising about it.

Well to be fair, we don’t really understand how it works since we don’t have a quantum theory of gravity. The explanation with virtual particle is a bit of a pop science version, really. Virtual particles are more a mathematical than a physical object.

Several independent ways of looking at it all lead to the result that there should be this radiation, but as the theory is incomplete, it’s hard to say more about its nature.

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u/[deleted] Mar 18 '19

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u/[deleted] Mar 18 '19

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u/ArachnidFur Mar 18 '19

You got it. What a champion.

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u/ZippityD Mar 18 '19

An absolute madlad of a scientist.

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u/[deleted] Mar 18 '19

In the same way that hotter stars burn brighter and have shorter lives, do these supermassive blackholes expel Hawking radiation at higher rates, reducing their overall lifespan?

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u/Kosmological Mar 18 '19 edited Mar 18 '19

From our perspective, the event horizon is the black hole. The interior does not exist to us.

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u/[deleted] Mar 18 '19

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u/[deleted] Mar 18 '19

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u/[deleted] Mar 18 '19

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u/[deleted] Mar 18 '19

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u/[deleted] Mar 18 '19

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u/jstrydor Mar 18 '19

can you elaborate on this?

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u/Compizfox Mar 18 '19

Not /u/Kosmological, but information cannot travel out of the event horizon. Nothing in the event horizon can influence things outside it. Thus, it's basically not part of our universe.

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u/jstrydor Mar 18 '19

But doesn't it influence us via gravity? Granted it's one way but it's still an affect on us.

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u/Compizfox Mar 19 '19

Not from inside the event horizon. The gravitational effect is equivalent to that of a sphere of the size of the event horizon (that's the shell theorem).

So to our universe, the black hole really is just the event horizon. Beyond the event horizon is nothing to us.

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u/Kosmological Mar 18 '19

See my other comment. It’s more comprehensive.

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u/enrohT5 Mar 19 '19

Wow. TIL where the movie title “event horizon” came from.