5d ago

Scientists Found a Black Hole That Shouldn’t Exist. Now Physics Has a Problem.

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5d ago

Scientists Found a Black Hole That Shouldn’t Exist. Now Physics Has a Problem.

18 comments

The "shouldn't exist" meant directly through star formation:
“Black holes this massive are forbidden through standard stellar evolution models.”
And ofc the obv explanation:
“One possibility is that the two black holes in this binary formed through earlier mergers of smaller black holes." Hannam said.
(Yes, I am the 'get off my lawn' of clickbait science articles.)
It's worth knowing the context that we only have a few hundred black hole merges detected (which are the only practical detections methods of non-supermassive black hole available to us), so there just isn't enough data for any statistics yet. Scientists are saying here 'whoa, this is the biggest merger yet detected'.
- Thank you. It can be challenging as a lay person to filter out the clickbait aspects of these articles.
  
  Thanks, as the layest of lay persons that sounds confident boosty :D.
- I don't have any formal training in astrophysics, however I have watched all of PBS Spacetime. They (probably) formed by smaller black holes merging
  However, these black holes’ masses aren’t the only mystery, as both were spinning between 80 and 90 percent of their top speed limit.
  For a planet, angular momentum is distributed between the spin of the planet and its revolution in its orbit, and these are often exchanged by various mechanisms.
  Furthermore from the Wikipedia article:
  The conservation of angular momentum explains the angular acceleration of an ice skater as they bring their arms and legs close to the vertical axis of rotation. By bringing part of the mass of their body closer to the axis, they decrease their body's moment of inertia. Because angular momentum is the product of moment of inertia and angular velocity, if the angular momentum remains constant (is conserved), then the angular velocity (rotational speed) of the skater must increase.
  The same phenomenon results in extremely fast spin of compact stars (like white dwarfs, neutron stars and black holes) when they are formed out of much larger and slower rotating stars.
  
  Yes, the size & the spin is explained by them merging before (an explanation so obvious that ofc it didn't take an eureka moment from the scientists), there is no other explanation really (except them theoretically being like from the ultra young space just after the big gang bang - but the location pretty much affirms this isn't the case even if those existed).
  The spin isn't an additional mystery, it's the same one, just two different measurements the system is designed to estimate.
Every new thing cosmologists find in space 'shouldn't exist'. That's how they advance science. At this point, this kind of title for this kind of news is so common it even ceased to be a trope. It leaves my spacetime unwrinkled.
- I’ll read “physics has a problem” as in like “here’s a math problem to solve.”
- Yeah, popmech and popsci have been trash for a while.
- Scientist measured short GW signal that is difficult to interpret. We publish to get more eyes on the problem.
  "Given the small number of observable GW cycles, the large uncertainties in our measurements, and the limitations of current signal models, we expect that there is much still to learn about GW231123 and its source. The feasibility of a wide range of other alternatives to black-hole mergers remains to be investigated. Even within the binary-black-hole merger interpretation, we expect to learn more from detailed studies of high-spin binaries, high-eccentricity mergers, hyperbolic encounters, and lensed signals"
  https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.08219
- There are things they find that should exist. For example we though exoplanets were out there but didn't find them until a few years ago.
"shouldn't exist"? More like, "we don't know how they are formed (yet)".
I guess the issue would be that there shouldn't have been enough time to form two black holes that large and have them meet by collisions. So either black holes are more common than thought, or there are other ways for them to form.
Eh, this story again and now with a even worse title.
Insert Uranus jokes here:
- Ha you fools, this way all the uranus jokes go straight to me inbox
To me it's interesting how probable it is for such improbably large black holes to meet in open space. Just how often such events should happen overall for us to notice one during our puny lifetime?
- It's actually mind-blwoing - current estimates suggest there are about 100 black hole mergers happening somewhere in the observable universe every minute, but we only detect a tiny fraction because most are too distant for our current instruments to pick up the gravitational waves.

18 comments

Insert Uranus jokes here: