"The larger the black hole, the longer it will take to evaporate. A 1 solar
mass black hole radiates much less power than that available in an AAA
battery."
Fascinating. Suntzeff speaks of evaporation as a 'given'.
For a moment there, I almost forgot that black hole evaporation is still technically an unproved hypothesis. Not officially even a theory, unless the LHC or space instruments such as GLAST (Fermi) have detected it in the last few months.
Also fascinating? That Suntzeff apparently was unaware that the total mass of the local group, which he agrees is gravitationally bound, is in the trillions of solar masses. Maybe he just meant that under the "simplist models of cosmology" there couldn't be any hypermassive black holes 'at this time'. Beause unless there is some drastic alteration of physics and gravity, hypermassive black holes are inevitable.
So what's going to happen to these hypermassive black holes if it turns out they don't evaporate? How are they going to 'fade away'? It's extremely unlikely they will, of course. Barring magic or godly intervention. They won't fade away even if they do evaporate. Realistically, they will always accrete more matter/energy than they lose. Unless (again) the laws of gravity and physics change suddenly. I suppose this is possible. Hmmm.
The universe is a lot for any one person to try and comprehend, and the world is full of very brilliant people like Suntzeff who do not venture far from their particular, and extremely narrow field of study.
Suntzeff assumes a lot. Like he said, he is an observer, not a deep thinker. He admits he doesn't pay much attention to theories, yet he apparently accepts the more popular ones as probably true, or true.
Perhaps his denial of the existence of hypermassive black holes is based on the theory that galaxies, and black holes are formed exclusively in hierarchical fashion. Perhaps it is based on the theory that the big bang was a generally homogeneous release of matter. Perhaps it is based on the theory that gravity and physics and chemistry didn't exist until some time after the big bang.
Of course, he is not an expert on black holes per se, so maybe we should check in with one. I wrote to Professor Martin Gaskell, head of the astronomy department at the University of Texas.
The following is a series of recent exchanges between us, edited for length and relevance. His notes are in blue italics. Hopefully this is not too confusing ...
Dear James,
I don't really work in cosmology. I'm afraid that I only work on more ordinary sized black holes in the centers of galaxies. These have only grown to be large in recent years so they are unrelated to the giga-massive black holes you postulate.
I write back:
Dear Martin,
Thank you for the note and for not being overly annoyed. If not for people like you, I would have no cosmological theory at all.
Find me a 50 billion solar mass black hole, will you?
Brand new discoveries you might find interesting.
http://news.discovery.com/space/obese-black-hole-110112.html
Wed Jan 12, 2011 05:30 PM ET ... The black hole inside a neighboring galaxy, known as M87, is obese and filled with the equivalent of 6.6 billion of our suns, according to new measurements.These supermassive black holes are relatively rare, scientists suspect, so it is surprising that such a behemoth lives relatively close by -- just 50 million light-years away.
http://science.gaeatimes.com/2010/08/26/how-the-first-super-massive-black-holes-were-born-21533/
Monday, January 10, 2011 ... "For more than two decades, the prevailing wisdom among astronomers has been that galaxies evolved hierarchically - that is, gravity drew small bits of matter together first, and those small bits gradually came together to form larger structures."
“Together with these other discoveries, our result shows that big structures - both galaxies and massive black holes - build up quickly in the history of the universe. Amazingly, this is contrary to hierarchical structure formation,” he said.
http://science.gaeatimes.com/2011/01/10/supermassive-black-hole-discovered-in-dwarf-galaxy-29820/
Monday, January 10, 2011 ... “Now, we have found a dwarf galaxy with no bulge at all, yet it has a supermassive black hole. This greatly strengthens the case for the black holes developing first, before the galaxy’s bulge is formed,” said Reines.
Best of luck to you.
He writes:
Hi James,
Find me a 50 billion solar mass black hole, will you?
10 billion solar masses is easy. 50 billion is getting up the upper limit in the currently observable universe. I bet there are one of two around though!
Brand new discoveries you might find interesting.
http://news.discovery.com/space/obese-black-hole-110112
Wed Jan 12, 2011 05:30 PM ET ... The black hole inside a neighboring
galaxy,known as M87, is obese and filled with the equivalent of 6.6 billion of our suns, according to new measurements.These supermassive black holes are relatively rare, scientists suspect, so it is surprising that such a behemoth lives relatively close by -- just 50 million light-years away.
This is a fairly solid result. The people working on this are colleagues of mine.
http://science.gaeatimes.com/2010/08/26/how-the-first-super-massive-black-holes-were-born-21533/
Monday, January 10, 2011 ... "For more than two decades, the prevailing
wisdom among astronomers has been that galaxies evolved hierarchically -
that is, gravity drew small bits of matter together first, and those small
bits gradually came together to form larger structures."**
“Together with these other discoveries, our result shows that big structures
- both galaxies and massive black holes - build up quickly in the history of
the universe. Amazingly, this is contrary to hierarchical structure formation,” he said.
That's a more questionable result.
http://science.gaeatimes.com/2011/01/10/supermassive-black-hole-discovered-in-dwarf-galaxy-29820/
Monday, January 10, 2011 ... “Now, we have found a dwarf galaxy with no
bulge at all, yet it has a supermassive black hole. This greatly strengthens
the case for the black holes developing first, before the galaxy’s bulge is
formed,” said Reines.
I think that last paper is probably wrong.
Martin
I respond with some of the arguments for the early development of supermassive black holes I have already presented on this thread. Within the first 200 million years after the big bang.
He writes back:
The observations show that the 10^10 solar mass BHs didn't grow in the early universe. The BHs see before them all have lower masses. That's a rather clear result. We'd see the 10^10 guys if they were there.
Yes, there are some pretty extreme ideas in cosmology! Most of them will be wrong (they can't ALL be right!), but who knows which will be right?
My rebuttal:
Yes Martin, I agree with you that this ( smaller than 10^10 going backwards in time ... generally speaking ) is what the observations have shown.
However ... there are also obvious limititations to detecting black holes. If they are not active, not emitting xrays, or have few if any stars orbiting them we are not going to see them. But they can make their presence known in other ways. The following is recent data from ESA, and articulates problems that would be solved by my model.
Although this data shows a smooth drop off in galaxies per volume of space, this is also not incompatible with my model. Again, I postulate a large family of black holes formed by the BB itself, and very rapid merges which could be responsible for great deal of the ionization in the first 200 million years. I must disagree on your assertion that we 'would see the 10^10 guys. They could be hidden for several reasons, and they might have existed so early that they are simply too quiet for us to detect using the normal methods.
I expect the number of black holes that escaped the very early universe are small. But I also think many still did, and they are partly responsible for the 10^9 10^10 black holes we see around in the later universe. We can measure the ages of the stars orbiting the black hole, but that does not tell us the age of the black hole. It could be younger, or older than the attendant galaxy. Correct? If we just assume hierarchical formation, then that gives us a number, but we can't say for certain it was hierarchical. We have evidence of this, but Is there any reason why it can't be both?
The point I am trying to make is .. extremely early universe black holes ( very massive ones ) could be there. Non active and invisible. They did all their work long before we think they existed.
One more point ... although you disagree with the 'discoveries' of 10^10 black holes in the ancient quasars, even if many were only 10^9 or 10^8, what do you think they are now? 13 billion years later? In that dense environment? Trillions? Quadrillions?
One paper from Tel Aviv ( 7 year Chandra observational study, I believe ) said supermassive black holes formed by 1.2 billion years. 2 - 4 billion years before accepted modeling shows they should have formed.
http://sci.esa.int/science-e/www/object/index.cfm?fobjectid=46243
The HUDF09 team also combined the new Hubble data with observations from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope to estimate the ages and masses of these primordial galaxies. "The masses are just 1 percent of those of the Milky Way," explains team member Ivo Labbé of the Carnegie Institute of Washington, lead author of two papers on the data from the combined NASA Great Observatories. He further noted that "to our surprise, the results show that these galaxies at 700 million years after the Big Bang must have started forming stars hundreds of millions of years earlier, pushing back the time of the earliest star formation in the Universe."
"This is about as far as we can go to do detailed science with the new HUDF09 image. It shows just how much the James Webb Space Telescope is needed to unearth the secrets of the first galaxies," says Illingworth. The challenge is that spectroscopy is needed to provide definitive redshift values, but the objects are too faint for spectroscopic observations (until JWST is launched), and the redshifts have to be inferred from the apparent colours of the galaxies.
The teams are finding that the number of galaxies per unit of volume of space drops off smoothly with increasing distance, and the HUDF09 team has also found that the galaxies become surprisingly blue intrinsically. The ultra-blue galaxies are extreme examples of objects that appear so blue because they may be deficient in the heavier elements, and as a result, are quite free of the dust that reddens light through scattering.
A longstanding problem with these findings is that it still appears that these early galaxies did not emit enough radiation to "reionise" the early Universe by stripping electrons from the neutral hydrogen that cooled after the Big Bang. This "reionisation" event occurred between about 400 million and 900 million years after the Big Bang, but astronomers still don't know which light sources caused it to happen. These newly discovered galaxies date from this important epoch in the evolution of the Universe.
Perhaps the density of very faint galaxies below the current detection limit is so high that there may be enough of them to support reionisation.
~ Or there were an awful lot of black holes with very few stars doing the work. Either case would support my model. The JWST is going to shed some light on this as will NuSTAR.
Or there was an earlier wave of galaxy formation that decayed and then was "rebooted" by a second wave of galaxy formation. Or, possibly the early galaxies were extraordinarily efficient at reionising the Universe.
~ Or again, perhaps there were far more than we think. What would make them 'extraordinarily' efficient? Radiation from stars is what it is. If the density of the universe was higher then, wouldn't this impede ionization from ordinary light? Wouldn't supermassive black holes blasting jets of xrays strip the electrons much faster? It would appear this is being offered up as a serious possibility in the following paragraph.
Due to these uncertainties it is not clear which type of object or evolutionary process did the "heavy lifting" by ionising the young Universe. The calculations are inconclusive, and so galaxies may do more than currently expected, or astronomers may need to invoke other phenomena such as mini-quasars (active supermassive black holes in the cores of galaxies) - current estimates suggest that quasars are even less likely than galaxies to be the cause of reionisation. This is an enigma that still challenges astronomers and the very best telescopes.
~ Estimates based on assumed purely hierarchical formation of black holes and galaxies. Which is based on the assumed distribution and the state of matter following the BB and the initial hyperinflation. Better be sure of the foundation before you start buiding on it.
"We know the gas between galaxies in the Universe was ionised early in history, but the total light from these new galaxies may not be sufficient to achieve this." said Andrew Bunker of the University of Oxford, a researcher on one of the European teams.
He notes that "the unique infrared sensitivity of Wide Field Camera 3 means that these are the best images yet for providing detailed information about the first galaxies as they formed in the early Universe."
James Dunlop of the University of Edinburgh agrees. "These galaxies could have roots stretching into an earlier population of stars. There must be a substantial component of galaxies beyond Hubble's detection limit."
~ Hmm. Dunlop agrees with me in principle. There could easily be a substantial component of supermassive black holes, too. In fact, if there are galaxies, there are going to be massive and supermassive black holes. I have other very recent supporting material from ESA and Planck, too, such as the discovery of heavy elements that could probably only exist if something made stars form extremely early.
The existence of these newly found galaxies pushes back the time when galaxies began to form to before 500-600 million years after the Big Bang. This is good news for astronomers building the much more powerful James Webb Space Telescope (JWST; planned for launch in 2014), which will allow astronomers to study the detailed nature of primordial galaxies and discover many more even farther away. There should be plenty for JWST to hunt for.
Yes, I may be wrong. But there is at least some evidence suggestive of me being right. As I said already, the evidence may already be there, but we haven't looked at it correctly, or the current data of the very early universe is insufficient to make a determination.
If we do discover 50 billion sun black holes in the early universe, will that help convince you at all?
Take care Martin. You are a good sport. I am terribly inarticulate, and far too verbose. You may be totally correct and my head is ... uhh, nevermind. But ok to reserve judgement, or should I go ahead and burn my model now?
He writes:
Hi James,
As I might have said already, I'm getting a HUGE number of e-mails these days, so I unfortunately can't give a detailed reply.
I can make a few general comments though. The useful thing about your model is that you HAVE a model and this is making you explore the literature for evidence that might support it. So in doing so you are going to find out lots of interesting things about the universe that you might not otherwise take the time to read. In doing this you will find things that don't seem to support your model and things that seem to support it. This then lets you refine your model or abandon your model and come up with a new model. That's all part of the basic scientific process.
The important thing in this is be willing to change your model (and to change other people's models too). If you don't do that you can missing out on making discoveries!
I combine my last rebuttal along with
his responses ...
Hi James,
Again I apologize for taking your time Martin. Thank you for the advice. I
continue to read ... glad many papers are free, such as these two of yours.
http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/1004/1004.1180v1.pdf
http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/0711/0711.1013v1.pdf
I look at evidence that does not support my model probably harder than I
look at evidence that does. In so many papers baseline assumptions are all
too often treated as givens, including yours.
Yes. That can be a problem. And sometimes they are wrong.
So my first job, in the event of a paper that appears to conflict with my postulates is to question the assumptions.
That's a reasonable thing to do.
How else are we to make new discoveries?
Have you ever met a Schwarzchild ( non-rotating ) black hole? I can't find
one paper that confirms they exist at all. The evidence instead appears to
support all black holes spin very rapidly.
There's debate about how much they spin. I don't think we really know. For low-mass black holes the spin estimates could be quite wrong.
I question the BB singularity. There is no observational evidence to suggest the theoretical zero-point version ever existed. I question the physical viability of an ever-increasing rate of acceleration for the recession. The laws we are familiar with would seem to prohibit such a phenomenon ... for very long, anyway.
A binary BH system that gets too close to a core supermassive may eject one
of the binaries.
Yes. BH's probably are ejected.
I won't argue with the assumption of hierarchical galaxy formation, however, there may be other methods of culling out evidence for early supermassives, and we simply have not created the right algorithm yet, because we may have made the wrong assumptions in creating the algorithms.
If there were many black holes in the early universe along with a much
higher density of protogalaxies, then it is reasonable to consider the
possibility that those early binaries or trinaries had occasional high
velocity ejections too.
Yes.
Is there no case to be made for both hierarchical and non-hierarchical
systems? With the hierarchical systems in the vast majority of the Hv?
That's a bit beyond what I work on, but I think that's not an unreasonable idea.
There is so much we have yet to look at Martin. Our technology still has serious limitations.
You are an expert in your field, without question. But I don't think even
you can state with a high level of probability, let alone absolute certainty
that a very high number of black holes did not exist in the very early
universe, and that there are no 10^8 to 50^10 or greater supermassives in
the 1st 200 million years following the BB. It is possible they could have
been responsible for the majority of initial ionization and early star
formation. I must believe the ESO people are also experts in the field and
they certainly don't deny the possibilities, as they state in the article
below.
Of course I must keep an open mind, but it would be premature and illogical
to make wholesale changes to my model until more data is available. If
I remove the central element, there is no model. Back to square one.
With all due respect, even your extensive knowledge is hampered by lack of
data.
We certainly run into data limitations at the very earliest times!
Other models? I have looked at too many to count. I have found none so far
that offer solutions that do not border on the bizarre. When magic, alternate dimensions or gods are invoked, I have read enough. In any event, there are plenty of people working on those already. Good luck to them. I won't burn the model just yet.
All I am doing is offering an alternative, hoping to encourage further
investigation.
I apologize once more for arguing with you. Thank you again, and I wish you
continued success.
I'm sorry that I can't give more than brief replies.
All the best,
Martin
A very courteous, patient, and brilliant man. Yet with all his expertise, and broad knowledge, he is clearly not up to date on the latest observations. And as with Suntzeff, he accepts certain widely-held assumptions/theories about the early universe as probably true, or true.
If any want to check his credentials, here is his homepage.
http://www.as.utexas.edu/~gaskell/