Tuesday, March 29, 2011

Most Massive Black Hole Discovered


Wow, now this is just plain amazing! According to an article in 'The Daily Galaxy, the Chandra space telescope has uncovered a singularity in the M87 galaxy located in the Virgo Cluster that is so massive as to almost be beyond belief.

The black hole at the center of the super massive M87 galaxy tops out at 6.6 billion solar masses, yes BILLION. To put that into perspective, the central black hole in our Milky Way is a very respectable 4 million solar masses. Also what makes M87's singularity so frightening is the diameter of it's event horizon, which is aproximatly 20 billion km across!

Astronomers from the University of Texas :
  • theorizes that the M87 black hole grew to its massive size by merging with several other black holes.... of 100 or so smaller galaxies.
Another interesting theory concerning the M87 black hole is that due to it's size and relative proximity, may be the first black hole that we will be able to "see".

Check out the rest of the Daily Galaxy article here

4 comments:

John said...

I think the universe will stop expanding soon if it hasn't already (Evidence in the form of recently discovered Cosmic Bruising?). Eventually, black holes will be all that's left, which will create a feedback loop within space-time and then our entire universe will collapse in on it's self while expelling it's self at the same time... This resulting hiccup will cause another big bang. I guess I'm saying this because I think we'll find even larger black holes in the near future. I wrote this theory out a while back, I call it the Inverse Sphere Model. Just an unwashed villager's attempts to understand the universe around him. ;)

Beam Me Up said...

Sounds damn impressive to me! I lean towards black holes eventually evaporating which sounds suspiciously like your theory. If all space/time mass is wrapped into a singularity then the ejection/evaporation would be the big bang right?

John said...

In a nut shell...

I believe our universe is layered like an onion. The information consumed by a black hole is stored "on" our outer shell like a massive hologram, then there's a layer of dark matter between that and our known universe... So you've got a 3 layered sphere... The outer shell, dark matter and the known universe/inner sphere.

After inflation is equalized, things will come back together and eventually our universe will consist of no more than 1 super massive black hole which will begin to consume the dark energy which surrounds it. Once it gobbles up most of the dark energy it will begin to create a feedback loop with the outer shell, attempting to form a paradox; Much like a dog eating it's self tail first. And since that can't happen, the universe compresses further and eventually begins inflation again... Rinse & repeat.

But yeah, that's the nut shell. haha... If you can't consume it, you've gotta throw it back up.

John said...

Edit: I said the 2nd layer consisted of dark matter, I meant to say dark energy.