Lots of Ink: Supermassive Black Holes are even more super, maybe deserve a -duper.
Artist rendering by Lynette Cook/Gemini Obs.
It’s only Tuesday and already we’re overwhelmed by astronews. Yesterday came the closest thing yet to a Goldilocks planet suited to be home to life, and today two things that aren’t suitable for anything alive, for long: Supermassive black holes that contain the heft of billions and billions of stars. The previous record holder, a 6.3 billion solar mass beast residing quietly in nearby galaxy M87 has nothing on what a team led by a woman at UC Berkeley with participation from others there and elsewhere (U. Texas-Austin, Michigan, Toronto..) say they infer in two galaxies much farther away. One of the monsters appears to be whipping nearby stars around with the gravitational muscle of nearly ten billion stars like ours, and the other could be twice as massive.
Both, it says here, once were brilliant quasars lighting the early universe as they devoured matter. They now are dimmed by a shortage of material close enough to eat. Such things are not mere nooks of one-way space. They have event horizons (borders of no return) billions of miles wide – broad enough to tuck many copies of our own solar system including the Kuiper belt inside without having to squash them even though they’d get squashed anyway. The discoveries, say the researchers, means that the nature of the relationship between a large galaxy’s total mass and the mass caught in its core’s relatively tiny black hole is yet to be fully laid out. The paper also seems to be a triumph of astronomical observation. It is not easy to peek into a galaxy’s deepest innards to gauge its turmoil from 300 million light years away.
These black holes are too big for the embargo to hold them. The journal Nature had its usual Thursday lockbox setting in place. Kablooie, ’twas rendered asunder like a planet ripped in a black hole’s scissoring tide. In the UK the Sunday Times‘s Jonathan Leake put the basic news in the paper on of course Sunday. The paper. a Murdoch property, is a separate operation from its sister, the daily Times. It has staffers who don’t give a fig about some journal’s embargo if they have the story already and wish not to come out with the news days behind everybody else. From reading the story, which is quite brief, one sees no sure sign that Mr. Leake had a source of information independent of what was in Nature and its press advisory. So, absent further evidence (such as bloggers also running ahead of the herd, or a manuscript posted somewhere in the open), one guesses this may have been a pure and conscious embargo break. At the useful site EmbargoWatch Ivan Oransky has a short post on it. He remarks that The Sunday Times routinely breaks embargoes and that it “obtains embargoed material in other ways, including finding freely (available) but ‘embargoed’ abstracts.” Oransky also tells us that Mr. Leake, up to his name, is a pro at punching embargoes full of holes. One would like to know, just as a matter of craft, how he got hold of the news outside Nature’s email list and presumably with no permit to enter the password-protected Nature press site. Perhaps one of the press releases was put out in the open? This is one more sign that routine, journal-driven embargoes may pass away soon.
Coverage is heavy, and much of it looks a bit rushed in the wake of the embargo collapse.
Other Stories:
- NYTimes – Dennis Overbye: Astronomers find biggest black holes yet ;
- LA Times – Amina Khan (with Eryn Brown): Astrophysicists find biggest black holes yet ;
- AP – Marcia Dunn: Scientists find monster black holes, biggest yet ;
- Space.com – Charles Q. Choi: Monster black holes are most massive ever discovered ; Also at space.com a video explainer from the Dunlap Institute at the U. of Toronto.
- PBS NewsHour – Jenny Marder: Researchers Discover Monstrous Supermassive Black Holes ; Nice job, including commentary by a Yale man who is not among the authors.
- Focus Taiwan – Team led by Taiwanese astronomer discovers largest black holes ; Always the local angle.
- Nature.com – Ron Cowen: Record-breaking black holes fill a cosmic gap ; Cowen, who works for Nature’s news/journalism wing, got this posted yesterday after the embargo break, on the journal’s newsblog site. He quotes a well-known Harvard cosmologist, Avi Loeb, and may well have been working on the piece with his eye on Thursday when the roof fell in.
- New Scientist – Stephen Battersby – Two biggest black holes ever found ;
- Decccan Herald (India) Kalyan Ray : Two masive black holes discovered ; Entertaining, mostly right but tinged with the daffy. Such as a comment that the laws of physics do not work inside the event horizon.
- AFP – Astronomers discover biggest black holes ever ;
- Guardian (UK) Alok Jha: Supermassive black holes are largest ever discovered;
- San Francisco Chronicle – David Perlman: Cal astronomers report finding largest black holes ; Good good good but … Perlman might rethink characterizing a fading quasar as retiring and becoming a mere star for awhile. No quasar, its engine a supermassive black hole, ever turned into a star. Dim as a star, maybe.
- PopSci – Rebecca Boyle: Two Behemoth Black Holes, the Largest Ever Discovered, Could Swallow Billions of Suns ; Actually, they already did swallow the equivalent of billions of suns.
Grist for the Mill:
UC-Berkeley Press release ; U. Texas-Austin Press Release ; U. Toronto Press Release ; U. Michigan – Ann Arbor Press Release ; Gemini Observatory Press Release ; NSF Press release ;
- Charlie Petit
