Lots of Ink for those old reliables. Black holes. This time they’re eating stars, doing a tango, showing up early
Often, when I pay too little noticeable attention to Mrs. Tracker, she accuses me of thinking about black holes (or quarks) when there are more important matters at hand. I never, almost, spontaneously think about either. They just don’t come up that much. But black holes (and quarks) are standards on the science journalism beat. This week, independent spots of research put supermassive black holes – the kind that sit in galactic lairs and sometimes spout quasar beacons, giant radio lobes, or otherwise show off – into the news several ways.
Too much to gather them all but here are example stories.
1) Early Universe had massive black holes as soon as galaxies began forming. The news, first reported in the journal Nature, is that data from several telescopes on Earth and in space see signs of rapid black hole growth – toward the supermassive variety seen in nearer and more contemporary galaxies – in emanations from when the universe was a few hundred million years old. This is a big deal for people who theorize how galaxies evolve and what role central black holes play.
Stories:
- Wired – Mark Brown: Astronomers find ancient supremassive black holes, 13 billion years old ; Again the old conundrum, as in a conundrum about oldness. They found young supermassive black holes, and not 13 b. but just 700 to 950 million years old. But it’s taken nearly 13 billion years for us to see them. This is a usage conundrum. It’s played out entirely in the headline – Brown’s story explains explicitly what we’re looking at, temporally speaking.
- PC Magazine – William Fenton: Early Universe Riddled With Black Holes ;
- Time Mag – Matt Peckham: NASA; Supermassive Black Holes at Heat of Ancient Galaxies ; Yes, it’s a NASA observatory, the Chandra X-ray telescope, that got the main data. But it’s not quite NASA making the discovery. It’s university-affiliated astronomers who use it who got the data and wrote the paper.
Grist for the Mill: NASA Chandra Press Release ; Yale U. Press Release ; U. Hawaii Press Release ;
2) A Galaxy not so very far away, with two supermassive black holes. Chandra, again, and other telescopes gathered from a well-known, pretty nearby galaxy called Markarian 739 startlingly clear proof that twin black hole beacons – lit up by matter spiraling in each to its oblivion – stare from separate lairs near its heart. It looks a little like a smiley face, or maybe a scary clown.The news stems from a paper submitted to the Astrophysical Journal.
Stories :
- Astronomy Now – Emily Baldwin: Galaxy boasts two monster black holes ;
- Space.com – Tariq Malik: Twins! Another black hole found in one galaxy ;
- Huffington Post – Dean Praetorius: Dual Black Holes Inhabit Nearby Galaxy ;
Grist for the Mill: Nat’l Science Foundation – Press Release/story ;
3) 
MUNCH! A supermassive black hole is eating a star for lunch. A powerful burst of gamma rays looks a bit different from the usual gamma ray burst associated with the collapse of giant stars into smallish black holes (all this in the course of a superrnova explosion). Astronomer think this brilliant episode marks the violent rending of a solar-type star as it spins to its doom in the accretion disk of a supermassive black hole in a galaxy’s heart. The report is in Science.
Stories:
- Reuters – Deborah Zabarenko: Black hole shreds star, sparking gamma ray flash ;
- AP : Black hole that ate star caused blast ;
- Montreal Gazette/PostMedia News – Margaret Munro: Scientists record ‘death rattle’ of star hitting black hole: It hasn’t really hit the black hole yet (and will asymptotically-close-to-never hit it in our time frame), but never mind the relativistic weirdness of reality. It is on its way there.
Grist for the Mill: UC Berkeley Press Release ; Warwick U. Press Release ; Science paper abstract ;
- Charlie Petit
