For all the excitement at NASA, you’d think astronomers have seen a black hole form. Which is impossible, literally, but the noise and general stirmash around it might be impressive. And that’s just what, news reports say, they have seen.

The news is that the Chandra X-ray orbiting observatory, along with the agency’s Swift satellite and two European orbiting instruments, have gathered evidence, 30 years after a supernova flash was seen in a fairly nearby galaxy, that a black hole formed. By theory, many supernovae occur during collapse of very massive stars, an implication that the part that doesn’t go exploding outwardmay wind up in a black hole. But now, for the first time, it appears not only that Earth scientists saw the explosion, but are picking up with the space telescope direct evidence that a newborn black hole is howling away in the leftovers.NASA heralded the news with a big press conference yesterday at its DC headquarters.

I do wish my understanding or relativity were better. For instance, the Washington Post‘s Marc Kaufman, in giving this news big treatment including graphics and video, wries that “eventually it (the star’s dead core) can collapse to the point of having no volume and infinite density – at which point it is a black hole.” Other accounts similarly describe what has happened some 50 million light years away.

Okay, that means that we are getting signals that, 50 million years ago, a spot of infinite density and zero volume formed out there. But, I am also confident that I have been assured by top notch astrophysicists and relativity specialists, in a time frame outside the black hole itself, it hasn’t happened. The event horizon or point of no return is there, wide as a planet’s orbit, but all the stuff is redshifted to infinity, frozen in place just inside that event horizon. If that’s right, the stuff may feel it’s fallen in a twinkling down the ultimate rat hole right to its non-dimensional bottom, but not yet on the calendars kept by anybody outside. Isn’t relativity, like, weird?

DID PRESS MISS STORY, THEN BITE HARD WHEN LURED?

So, there’s lots of ink, and I’ll look for anybody who tackles the time paradoxes. But first, a sort of spoiler. Daniel Fischer, a science reporter and blogger in both English and German, has assembled a timeline of news and missed opportunities by the science writing community to have spotted this story as big news long before NASA packaged it all up with a bow on top. Aside from the non-newness of this news (except that few reported it so it IS news), he reports, the researchers are not nearly as certain of the diagnosis as news releases, ergo news accounts, suggest.

Anyway, Other Stories:

• AP – Seth Borenstein: Baby photos form the ultimate edge – a black hole ; What is a baby black hole, or how is it outwardly different from older ones? All one detects is gravity, spin, and charge (if any). Does it consume matter, form an accretion disk, or do anything else differently from an old one?
• NPR – Richard Harris: Supernova Shines Light On Black Hole Formation ; Nice job of adding a few doubts to the report.
• Universe Today – Nancy Atkinson: Has a Recent, Nearby Supernova Become a Baby Black Hole?
• National Geo – Andrew Fazekas: Baby Black Hole Found – Are You Older Than a Cosmic Monster? ;
• BBC – Jonathan Amos: Telescopes spy ‘baby black hole’ ;
• .. there is more, I’ll update this later but time is short, the morning’s gone.

*UPDATES (Nov. 17)

• Christian Science Monitor – Pete Spotts: Where once a star shone, scientists see evidence of a baby black hole ; A well-hedged piece. Readers who pay attention to such things won’t be able to tease Spotts about that black hole he said just formed should the consensus view change. It says here maybe, and spells out the alternative explanation.
• New York Daily News – Michael Sheridan: ‘Baby’ black hole captured in stunning space image by astronomers ; It is an error to say the image, however stunning, shows a black hole. There never has been a picture of a black hole because that’s the point of its being a black hole – it’s a no see’um. The supernova flash is the same whether a pulsar or anything else is left in the smoldering debris. Oh, sigh….. On the bright side, it does hint at something, which is that if it IS a neutron star, that in itself would be the youngest one ever found. If so maybe somebody’ll see it spinning up as it accretes stuff???? But this story is just too short to mean much, one must say. It’s not even a gee-whiz story – more of a whiz.
• Register – Lewis Page : 50m-year-old mystery space object doesn’t look a day over 30 ; Some day I will learn how much readership the Register and its science staff (Page and Lester Haines, so far as I can tell) get at this on line, cheeky tech news outlet. They both tend to the outrageous over-exuberance in launching their stories, but can be pretty clever. That hed is one to appreciate. It exploits a common turn of phrase to slyly note the difference between how long ago this event occurred, and the freshness of its image as it arrives in our neck of the woods. Plus, he explains and concedes that we are not seeing a black hole, but perhaps its glow: “Matter falling into them is commonly wracked so severely as to squirt out X-rays.” Well put. Also well put is his explainer of a neutron star as alternative diagnosis.
• ABC Australia – Timothy McDonald: NASA keeps close eye on baby black hole ; Note the difference in how unqualified is the writer’s own characterization – that scientists say it IS a black hole – with the quote with which he doesn’t quite back it up. Phrases such as ‘evidence for’ and “might be’ figure prominently. No mention of the more prosaic, if still weird, possibility they’re looking at a fresh neutron star.

SPEAKING OF BLACK HOLES (Get me rewrite!):

• WiredNews – Lisa Grossman: The Universe’s Most Extreme Black Holes; This is a gallery of examples, with supposedly nearest, farthest, biggest, oldest, etc. black holes, updated to reflect the so-called baby black hole in the news. The example of farthest makes little sense. Six million light years? That’s about the distance to its host galaxy so that’s no typo. It’s a deeper error. This needs a re-do. Perhaps it is referring to farthest stellar-mass black hole but is clearly out of date. Most perplexing.

Grist for the Mill: NASA Press Release ; Paper preprint at arXiv.

- Charlie Petit

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 16th, 2010 at 3:45 pm and is filed under Science Stories. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.