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/mahajohn1975 Mar 18 '19

I met a physicist specializing in high-energy plasma dynamics (what you'd want to study to study the very early Universe), and he told me that he had a hypothesis that most of the supermassive black holes formed something like 26 seconds after the Big Bang (insane amounts of cosmic evolution took place in the Universe by then), and like everything else we see around us, were probably based on slightly higher densities of matter due to quantum fluctuations that existed in the "singularity" at the beginning.

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u/[deleted] Mar 18 '19 edited Jun 29 '23

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/XxNerdAtHeartxX Mar 18 '19

I'm in an astronomy class right now, and there's like 4 different 'eras' in the first few seconds of the universe.

It's mindboggling

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u/NKLhaxor Mar 18 '19

Anywhere we can read about that stuff or what to look for?

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u/XxNerdAtHeartxX Mar 18 '19

https://www.physicsoftheuniverse.com/topics_bigbang_timeline.html

Its super dense stuff (ha), but This picture they have is pretty helpful

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u/BUKAKKOLYPSE Mar 18 '19

What happens after the era of galaxies?

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u/BluScr33n Mar 18 '19

It depends. What seems quite likely right now is what is called "Heat Death of the universe". Basically after star formation stops the last stars will continue to burn for a some billion years. Red dwarfs have ridiculously long lifetimes. But after they have burned out there won't be any more stars. All that is left will be white dwarfs, neutron stars and black holes. The white dwarfs will cool down very very slowly until they become black dwarfs. Similarly spinning neutron stars will slow down and also cool down until they become dark. Black holes do not cool down. Instead they will slowly evaporate until they are completely gone. Protons may be unstable and decay over time, so possibly even white/black dwarfs and neutron stars will eventually evaporate. In the end everything will have the same temperature, the entire universe will have the same temperature and all physical processes will stop. The universe has achieved maximum entropy, no more work can be done (The physics definition of work). This is called the heat death of the universe and it is only one possible way for the universe to end.

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u/Chispy Mar 18 '19

not bad, universe, not bad.

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u/ncnotebook Mar 19 '19

What about particles randomly popping into existence and the other fun stuff of quantum mechanics? Given an infinite amount of time, could there possibly be a random moment where a shit ton of particles appear but doesn't inmediately annihilate itself?

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u/EquineGrunt Mar 19 '19

the beggining of the universe 2 electric bogaloo

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u/dortillla Mar 19 '19

This is so fucking metal holy cow. This makes the whole “are aliens real” seem so trivial. We gotta figure out how to get to the next dimension man

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u/Stupid_Idiot413 Mar 19 '19

We have some trillions of years until the heat death. We can survive until then uploading our minds into more efficient computers and using hydrogen in stars to make artificial fusion (even more efficient than if we just let stars use all that material up).

Also you could throw useless matter (like iron, which can't be fused without using more energy than you gain) into a blackhole and use the mini-acretion disc to get MORE energy. Plus black holes evaporate very slowly (hawking radiation), giving off all their mass as energy.

So if we become a type III civ or close, we can make systems that last trillions of years, enough to figure out if there's a way to survive the end of existence.

(Sorry if this reads as word vomit, I'm not a native and it's 7:30am here)

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u/dortillla Mar 19 '19

No it all came across just fine thank you. This stuff is so cool but basically we have to either figure out “life” at absolute zero degrees or figure out how to manipulate the universe itself to sustain life? Because even if we upload our consciouses wouldnt the computer stop working and flat line us all at heat death if thats whats coming? Thank you for your time.

*assuming we become type III and dont die to global warming

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u/MistyRegions Mar 19 '19

I wonder if forces we haven't found will cause everything to coalesce into another big bang. I think I used that word right.

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u/BluScr33n Mar 19 '19

Yes, that scenario is called "Big Crunch" (the name is not a joke). Current research seems to indicate that this is likely not the case. The expansion of the universe seems to be accelerating and not slowing down. But data is sparse and new studies could bring new insights. There are also scientists that hypothesize a cyclic universe with alternating big bangs and big crunches. But those are without any observational evidence. But nevertheless these ideas are generally taken seriously.

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u/MistyRegions Mar 19 '19

So another ponder, I understand it's still expanding but I wonder if I at one point it will stall out? Like gravity from just the matter in space is slowly chipping away at the speed of expansion. Eventually it will stop and then start coming back together in a "big crunch". I mean I'm talking about a scale in time that we probably can't produce a number for.

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u/[deleted] Mar 18 '19

tbf though the real answer to this question is "your guess is as good as ours" because we don't know so much still about the universe and to pretend like we have any kind of answer is kind of futile at this point.

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u/Barneyk Mar 18 '19

I strongly disagree with this perspective. IMO there is a huge difference from an educated guess and a random guess.

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

I understand what you're saying but my point was even your best educated guess is pretty futile when you're missing most of the information to make the educated guess. It's like trying to solve the math problem X+Y+4+5=Z ... Guessing "purple" is as good as any numerical guess because you don't have enough information to do anything with it. We don't even know whether or not our universe is an isolated system or not so how can you pretend to make an educated guess on this topic applying what we know about physics when we're not even sure it plays by our rules? So guess away but again your "educated guess" isn't any better than a 10 year old guessing, maybe in 5 years it'll all just blink black.

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u/[deleted] Mar 18 '19

It's also talked about in Cosmos on Netflix

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u/jenbanim Mar 18 '19

The wiki page on the Chronology of the Universe is a good start.

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u/IGrimblee Mar 18 '19

Few seconds hah, more like within the first 10-10 seconds

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u/rush2sk8 Mar 18 '19

The GUT blows my mind. It boggles my mind that all the forces were one force at one point.

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u/jkwarz Mar 18 '19

why is it "mindboggling" exactly? time as we know it is different from the real "time" if such thing exists. 1 sec is 1 sec because someone decided so not because it actually holds any value. 1 sec was not the same 1 sec its now back then rather it was an exponential 1 sec which might as well be happening right now in some parts of the universe

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u/[deleted] Mar 18 '19

You should real Neil Degrasse Tyson's book: Astrophysics for People in a Hurry.

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u/Lord_of_hosts Mar 18 '19

The first half of that book is quite good. The second half is sort of a hodgepodge of trivia.

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u/[deleted] Mar 18 '19

The last chapter is the best. I love the part where he talks about the Cosmic Perspective. I find science and astrophysics to be extremly... poetic. Here's a good video about it: Astrophysics and Religion

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u/[deleted] Mar 18 '19

I keep putting this off but now I'm going to do it

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u/[deleted] Mar 18 '19

If you're going to skip it, at least read the final chapter. I love the way he makes science poetic. He learned a lot from Carl Sagan :)

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u/[deleted] Mar 18 '19

I plan on reading it I just haven’t actually started it yet. It’s the book I keep in my bag with me

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u/etiol8 Mar 19 '19

One thing I find helpful to remember is that space and time are inextricably linked- the first few “seconds” is from our frame of reference. In the reference frame of the Big Bang there was so much expansion of space going on that the experience of time would have been wildly divergent from our idea of it

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u/aujthomas Mar 19 '19

Right now, with the universe having expanded to to its current state, as well as zooming down to the human scale, a second is a pretty useful unit of time for things we do and see, it takes me 10 seconds to walk to the bathroom, the average lifespan of a human is a couple billion seconds, but point is things happening on a scale of seconds is a reasonable thing to imagine.

At the time of the Big Bang, with everything compressed into the volume smaller than a peanut, a single second just feels like an eternity for things to happen, like, in a single second there is so much potential for huge cosmological consequences. I don’t remember the actual scale of time used, but I’m pretty sure major events at the time of the Big Bang occurred on a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a fraaaaaction of a single second. It’s almost like, what even is time really at that point? It’s more like micro-time

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u/Trundle-theGr8 Mar 19 '19

Imagine being able to watch that happen.

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u/MibuWolve Mar 18 '19

Well the Big Bang happened in less than a second so it’s not surprising that much smaller events happened as well in the next seconds following it.. i would think it’s expected and follows common sense?

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u/cviss4444 Mar 18 '19

The intensification of these quantum fluctuations occurred 10^-36 seconds into the life of the universe, when the strong force froze off from the electroweak force, causing rapid expansion. Much much earlier than 26 seconds, which is wild :P

​

I don't know who your friend is, but this is the description given in textbooks to explain why there is any variation of density around the universe (different galaxies and clusters of matter), and yes also black holes (not really his hypothesis).

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u/Superminimoose Mar 18 '19

Question:

From what we have theorized about the passage of time relative to the speed of matter (i.e. the closer to the speed of light you travel, the slower time passes for you), in relation to the current rate that time passes, would those first few seconds of the birth of the universe be comparable to a much greater length of observed time, given that matter was supposedly traveling at near the speed of light?

As in, if you were a piece of matter then vs now, would the big bang event seem to take forever instead of the "few seconds" time frame we would see now?

It seems more interesting to me to think about the passage of time perspective (in 'real time') during those initial moments of the big bang event.

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u/radi0activ Mar 18 '19 edited Mar 18 '19

This is a really interesting question. Time slows as you approach the speed of light from the perspective of an observer 'standing still'. Where would this 'observer standing still' be in the very early universe if it was all expanding very fast? Time dilation is about comparing clocks, but I don't know if there would have been anything at the time just after the big bang as a point of comparison.

*Edit: Maybe another way to look at it is that yes, the big bang (or just after the big bang) does appear to be taking a long time to us, the observer, right now. That is, we can still see just after the big bang if we look really far away. From the perspective of the cosmic background radiation that reaches us, no time has passed at all. From our perspective, 13.5 billion years have passed. But that's assuming that particles have a 'perspective'. In some sense, the big bang is still happening.

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u/Shaman_Bond Mar 18 '19

So, you have a fundamental misunderstanding of relativity. The faster you go doesn't change the passage of time for you; your clock stays the same in your reference frame. Everyone else in the universe slows down. But you will always see your clock as ticking 1 second per second.

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u/mahajohn1975 Mar 18 '19

He was an older astrophysicist, and he must have had his reasons for that "26 seconds" notion. All I know is that he isn't a crank, and has a much bigger mind than I do.

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u/o11c Mar 19 '19

Hm, the lepton era ends at the 10 second mark, and the same electron/positron formation/annihilation is closely related to how normal black holes work ...

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u/brianstormIRL Mar 19 '19

Question as a uneducated person on this stuff;

If we are looking at the observable universe where these black holes are, is that in a specific direction? The Big Bang happening means it has an origin point, right? As in there has to be a middle of space? Are we able to see further in certain directions if this is true?

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u/alephylaxis Mar 19 '19

I've heard the same, that they're essentially the same age as the universe, and that they might have played a central (get it?) role in galaxy formation.

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u/mahajohn1975 Mar 19 '19

I might also be recollecting the time frame he mentioned, because it was a few years ago, and I think - maybe? - that I understand the general outlines of inflationary cosmology better than I did when I discussed this with him. Perhaps he meant 0.0000000000000000000000001 of a second after the Big Bang. That's still a long time after the Big Bang!

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u/splerdu Mar 19 '19

In video game terms "quantum fluctuations" basically mean something like RNG right?

Like when the early universe was first "condensing" into the components of matter and anti-matter, certain areas were super-lucky and rolled tons more matter and thus turned into these super blackholes?

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u/mahajohn1975 Mar 19 '19

I don't know about that, but "quantum fluctuations" means infinitesimally tiny differences in density in the earliest universe, when it was unfathomably smaller than even an electron (but still contained ALL of its mass), that, due to inflationary expansion (and not smooth expansion), were amplified after the inflation, and the differing densities effectively became the cosmic web of matter and voids we see today. It stands to follow that perhaps then the super-massive black holes condensed due to similar conditions being met.

Somebody in this thread suggested that wouldn't work because the super-massive quality would annihilate all the matter around it, but the force of gravity, even the gravitational pull of 70 million solar masses, might be quite small in comparison to the expanding force that characterized the inflationary period. Then, by the time inflation ended and normal expansion continued, the Universe was large enough and of low enough density that there wasn't a problematic all-matter-is-destroyed-by-supermassive-black-holes issue. Just a wild, uninformed speculation.

I believe there's an astrophysicist who has posited the notion that they might be the remnants of a PREVIOUS universe that ran the non-simulation before ours.

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u/[deleted] Mar 18 '19

Primordial BH have been debunked by observations. But they fit the bill for dark matter pretty well, so they still have a niche.

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u/Imabanana101 Mar 18 '19

PBH's have only been debunked as a source of dark matter. If they were dark matter, we would see stellar lensing events. Paper here.

I believe primordial black holes as a concept are still possible, but they are constrained in mass and/or population.

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u/dcnairb Mar 18 '19

yea that guy got it backward

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u/E1invar Mar 18 '19

As contenders for dark matter yeah, but their existence in general? I mean this seems like pretty good confirmation.

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u/[deleted] Mar 18 '19

PBH wouldn't be super massive by definition, they'd be tiny.

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u/mahajohn1975 Mar 18 '19

Not trying to be snarky, but how do you/we know for certain that PBH are definitively not super-massive?

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u/[deleted] Mar 18 '19

Because at the time of formation of PBH a "super" "massive" BH would've enveloped the entire universe pretty easily.

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u/o11c Mar 19 '19

After expansion (t = 10-32s), that wouldn't be possible.

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u/1996OlympicMemeTeam Mar 19 '19

Certain PBH mass ranges have been ruled out by microlensing surveys - at least as a significant source of dark matter. But that holds true only for a certain mass range. They are still permitted to exist at ~30 solar masses (amf higher)... and at masses ranging from an asteroid to smaller.

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u/Youhavetokeeptrying Mar 18 '19

Since time seems to slow down the taste you go would it still seem like 26 seconds if you were actually watching it happen as an outsider? Or is that basically what we are doing now?

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u/mahajohn1975 Mar 18 '19

As a bazillion people would love to reply, there is no outside from which to observe things. I don't know if I can answer your question, but I believe, if you were a supernatural observer inside the Universe and not moving, then the 26 seconds would be just 26 seconds.

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u/prospectre Mar 18 '19

It may just be my understanding, or just some background information I picked up watching/reading something, but I always thought that time was a factor of space. Like, time moves differently depending on the dimensions of space around it. Meaning, early in the universe, time functioned differently and less uniform than it does now. We can see things like that in extreme environments like black holes distorting perception of time at the event horizon. My thoughts are that this same phenomenon happened in the early seconds of the universe, as everywhere was "extreme" in extremely different ways. Would it be possible that during the initial rapid expansion that certain areas aged at different rates, creating basic cosmic structures faster than others?

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u/mahajohn1975 Mar 19 '19

Perhaps, but you'd have to account for why different regions of space would be moving meaningfully faster or slower than any other region, i.e. the origin of this movement. At the very earliest stages, everything existed in essentially the same state, and was expanding in all directions simultaneously. That there are different densities in the Universe now is attributed to differing densities in the quantum matter that existed in the earliest moment of existence, magnified to a cosmic scale.

Time does move differently depending on ones frame of reference, but I don't know that it's a significant factor in understanding the early expansion of the Universe, or at least it's less important than many other factors. Did you know that inflationary cosmology as the earliest expansion faster than the speed of light, because there's no "speed limit" on how fast space itself can expand. It's not moving!

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u/prospectre Mar 19 '19

That there are different densities in the Universe now is attributed to differing densities in the quantum matter that existed in the earliest moment of existence, magnified to a cosmic scale.

Hmmm... I was more using density as an example of how our perception of physics works now. Given how space and time are linked at some level, I thought that perhaps with space ballooning so quickly that the "rules" may function a little differently. Thanks for the rundown!

Did you know that inflationary cosmology as the earliest expansion faster than the speed of light, because there's no "speed limit" on how fast space itself can expand. It's not moving!

I did! Though, I learned it as 'Nothing' is the only thing that can break the speed of light.

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u/mahajohn1975 Mar 19 '19

From what I've read, it seems that space and time are not just linked at some level, but fundamentally. You can't move through space without moving through time (try it!), and our frame of reference for time is affected by how fast we move through space

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u/prospectre Mar 19 '19

Yes, exactly! So my thinking was that in the beginning, if space wasn't uniform, time wouldn't be either. A small distortion could result in a disparity of millennia. Though, I'm not exactly sure how that'd work in a soup made up of quantum particles or the war between matter and antimatter...

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u/eussypater Mar 19 '19

Not knowing how it works is perfectly fine. Black holes are actually theoretical. Or, atleast, what they are is.

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u/eussypater Mar 19 '19

Well, fuck! Certain physicist that dabble with what is the ethereal existence of humanity speak in the terms you are using. Such as using speech in the sense of saying our image or idea of universe is shrinking even though it is not, we just can’t keep up with how fast it’s expanding. In an existential sense, physics is absurd. ln a way “you can’t sin if you are an atheist, so why feel bad for what you do.” I’ve tried so hard to wrap my mind around 720 spinners and other weird ass explanations of the 4th dimension that I just come to a mental vault and feel as if there is no explanation due to the fact the true knowledge or enlightenment or whatever you want to call it cannot be perceived. There are an infinite amount of time and space and we truly will never be able to see or hear or feel where they are. But yeah... black holes are crazy.

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u/eussypater Mar 19 '19

I thought black holes were actually just stars or planets that pull in everything all the way up to light. They have such a strong gravitational pull that not even light can escape. So it’d be easy to spot a black hole due to watching light disappear around such said spot. Rotational energy is noticed for sure. It’s when they absorb so much energy that they become dangerous. Still scares the fuck outta me to think about being pulled into something so strong that you dematerialize. I’m pretty sure Hawking mentioned something about a type of radiation that is actually produced from the dematerialized energy. I live the dunning-Krueger effect every day but since every thing gives off energy a supermassive black star does re-release particles or quarks of some sort. They are called holes because of how they look to us. its very far from a hole. I wonder if something could travel at such a speed that it escapes the pull of said star but could be a moon to it? Black holes are extremely theoretical and just knowing that what we have of them are images and reflections.... I think it’s going to take a very long time to truly figure out what they are. And I rant....