[HN Gopher] UHZ1: NASA Telescopes Discover Record-Breaking Black...
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       UHZ1: NASA Telescopes Discover Record-Breaking Black Hole
        
       Author : raattgift
       Score  : 30 points
       Date   : 2023-11-06 17:58 UTC (3 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (chandra.si.edu)
 (TXT) w3m dump (chandra.si.edu)
        
       | omnicognate wrote:
       | > 3.5 billion light-years from Earth
       | 
       | > mass falls between 10 and 100 million suns
       | 
       | The size of the sun already causes my brain to shut down.
       | Everything about this is beyond contemplation.
        
         | lgl wrote:
         | The article states that even though it's roughly in the
         | direction of a galaxy cluster that's 3.5 billion light years
         | away, further observations by JWST found it to in fact be some
         | staggering 13.2 billion light years away.
         | 
         | From the article:
         | 
         | > The extremely distant black hole is located in the galaxy
         | UHZ1 in the direction of the galaxy cluster Abell 2744. The
         | galaxy cluster is about 3.5 billion light-years from Earth.
         | Webb data, however, reveal that UHZ1 is much farther away than
         | Abell 2744. At some 13.2 billion light-years away, UHZ1 is seen
         | when the universe was only 3% of its current age.
        
           | omnicognate wrote:
           | Hah, my mind is proportionally more blown then.
        
           | ustamills wrote:
           | Wow, if we're seeing it that far in the past I wonder if
           | maybe it's large enough to have eaten the universe already
           | and we just don't know it yet.
        
             | pdonis wrote:
             | Black holes don't "eat" surrounding objects. Their gravity
             | is no different from the gravity of any other object of the
             | same mass. This hole has a mass between 10 and 100 million
             | solar masses; that's about the size of a dwarf galaxy. So
             | its gravity would be no stronger than a similarly sized
             | dwarf galaxy. We are in no danger of having the universe
             | eaten by dwarf galaxies.
        
         | basementcat wrote:
         | "Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-
         | bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way
         | down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to
         | space." -Douglas Adams
        
         | Tommstein wrote:
         | What breaks my brain is that if the Sun were compressed into a
         | black hole, its Schwarzschild radius would be less than 2
         | miles, but the biggest black hole we know about so far, Phoenix
         | A, has a Schwarzschild radius of almost 2,000 AU. The radius of
         | Neptune's orbit is "only" about 30 AU, so Phoenix A's
         | Schwarzschild radius is almost 70 times longer. Illustration
         | here:
         | https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d3/Phoenix_...
         | . And of course, volume increases cubically with radius. I have
         | a hard time contemplating that you could make a black hole that
         | ridiculously ginormous even if you crammed the entire universe
         | into one black hole, and yet Phoenix A is far from the only
         | supermassive black hole out there.
        
           | zoeysmithe wrote:
           | We're so pitifully small compared to these astronomical
           | bodies.
           | 
           | Sometimes I like to think of these things like how a self-
           | cognizant AI in a minecraft world would talk about ours. "So
           | if you look at our powerful redstone torch computer its an
           | 8-bit chip. Outside, they have 64-bit chips! Ours has 3,500
           | torches, theirs has at least 7-10 billion!"
        
           | pdonis wrote:
           | _> volume increases cubically with radius_
           | 
           | This intuition does not work in curved spacetime,
           | particularly not for black holes. Black holes do not even
           | have a well-defined volume at all.
        
         | ahmedhosssam wrote:
         | Isn't that saying that we are not that important in the
         | universe? I mean we should change our behaviour as humanity to
         | expand in the cosmos, instead of focusing on silly wars because
         | of silly reasons.
        
       | ahmedfromtunis wrote:
       | I wonder how big is (was?) that black hole? Is it the size of our
       | sun?
        
         | mperham wrote:
         | M87's black hole event horizon is larger than our entire solar
         | system. 2B+ solar masses.
        
       | _Microft wrote:
       | Does UHZ1 mean something like "ultra-high Z, #1"? (Z as in
       | redshift)
        
       | _Microft wrote:
       | The preprint can be found at https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.15458
        
       | gorgoiler wrote:
       | The video on this page does a very good job of answering the
       | question a lot of you might be asking right now: what happens
       | when you accidentally tread on one of these things:
       | 
       | https://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/72254-s...
       | 
       | Blue is free falling into the hole. Yellow is observing and sees
       | Blue's clock come to a halt on the horizon. Beyond that much I
       | can't really explain but I found the link on this page:
       | 
       | https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/689129/when-an-o...
        
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       (page generated 2023-11-06 21:00 UTC)