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cm0002 @lemmy.world

2mo ago

A Single, ‘Naked’ Black Hole Rewrites the History of the Universe | Quanta Magazine

www.quantamagazine.org

A Single, ‘Naked’ Black Hole Rewrites the History of the Universe | Quanta Magazine

19 comments

"Naked" is a rather unfortunate term to use to convey the meaning of "away from any nearby matter" in this context. For a moment, I thought they were talking about a naked singularity, and went 'wait, WHAT?!'.
- that's like the difference between gravity waves and gravitational waves.
  one is a crazy mind blowing science fiction thing, the other is like, surprisingly conventional
  
  Wait, what are gravity waves? And how does a black hole form without an event horizon?
- Quanta is a science rag. Is there an actual source about this?
  
  https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.21748
- I had the same thought. They should have called it a "lonely black hole" or similar.
  
  I was struggling to come up with something better that maintained brevity. "Lonely" works nicely. Kudos!
Single naked black holes in my area?
I do research on dark matter, and one of the more interesting possibilities I have heard is that these black holes could in theory be formed by directly collapsing dark matter!
There's and increasing amount of attention being spent investigating a slight modification to the standard Lambda cold dark matter cosmology, by allowing dark matter to have a little bit of self-interactions. These can then allow part of a larger dark matter halo to directly collapse into a black hole.
- I thought the idea behind primordial black holes was that they were what constituted the missing mass of dark matter?
  
  It's possible primordial black holes could be dark matter, but there's only a certain mass range allowed, roughly around the mass of an asteroid, for example.
  But somewhat confusingly, these would be poor candidates to seed these massive black holes.
- Anyone with a full brain knows that putting scientific phrasing into layman's conversation conveys a much dumber message than is intended. "scientists assume..." yes because without making assumptions, they'll never calculate anything. Assumptions get tweaked as evidence is presented. "Scientists can't explain why..." scientists do not have a foolproof explanation. They have theories that are likely and make sense, bit nobody knows for absolutely certain that it's true and extremely accurate. "Historians don't know what happened..." because they weren't there, but they probably have some good ideas.
Oh yeah, baby, take it all off!
Could there be a cycle of big bangs to big crunches, with a critical mass for a black hole causing it to explode/bang? During crunch phase localized black holes would form and possibly consolidate, and then instead of big bang being the entire mass of the universe, it can be most of the mass in the universe?
I think OP is saying this is very old because there is no mass around it for it to "feed" anymore. It would seem more probable for it to predate big bang rather than form soon after it.

19 comments