A single, 'naked' black hole confounds theories of the young cosmos
quantamagazine.org
quantamagazine.org
They are also a dark matter candidate, though this is more controversial. The ones we are seeing here would be huge ones but their masses could range the spectrum. Smaller ones would have evaporated already but there could be tons of asteroid, moon, and planetary mass ones around.
At least some dark matter may be black holes the size of a hydrogen atom with the mass of an asteroid, and similar objects. These would be incredibly hard to detect. The only way would be their gravitational effects on other bodies or weak anomalous radiation bursts when they rarely encounter matter.
They’re also awesome and weird. One could, for example, shoot right through the Earth. If it was small nothing might happen. Larger ones might cause seismic events or perhaps Tunguska type events due to induced fusion in the atmosphere. What was Tunguska anyway?
The most exciting thing is that if small mass PBHs exist and are common enough, we could find one someday in our solar system, maybe captured as a moon or in an asteroid belt. That would be close enough to send a probe to go look at it and do experiments with it. Being able to directly examine a black hole could be the thing that lets us “finish” physics. It would let us see conditions far beyond anything any imaginable terrestrial accelerator could ever produce.
Cool idea on Tunguska - would such an explanation make predictions that we could verify? Radioactivity or changes to carbon in stones or the rings of local trees... An interesting thought.
A black hole with the mass of the Moon would be smaller than a BB but would have the mass and inertia of the Moon. It would be basically immovable as far as we are concerned. Chuck stuff at it all day and its trajectory change would be so small we probably wouldn’t be able to measure it.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oberth_effect
Fire a super high thrust engine during flyby.
If the PBH were in orbit around the Sun I don’t see why a conventional gravity assist would not work, but an Oberth effect maneuver would be more powerful.
There's no heliocentric velocity in a slow-moving outer planet.
https://hn.algolia.com/?query=planet%20black%20hole&type=sto... ("What If Planet 9 Is a Primordial Black Hole?" (+ title variations))
For those that like science communication in video form, Becky Smethurst's YouTube channel has a ton of great info on super massive blackholes, and cosmology in general, from a practitioner in the field. Here's one from a month ago about the evidence (then) for whether super massive black holes or galaxies came first:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B9yDWbilIG4
The science appears to be moving very quickly with all the new info from JWST.
Reminds me of the "blowtorch theory"[0] discussed here on HN a while ago.
[0]: https://theeggandtherock.com/p/the-blowtorch-theory-a-new-mo...
Note that in spite of the name it's not a "theory" that gives an clear and accurate prediction.
We mix results of many theories, like electromagnetism, general relativity dopler effect, atoms ionization and spectrum, centripetal force, ... to get an accurate prediction and error estimation of how much mass a galaxy must have. Different calculations disagree, so we are forced to try to fix the theory (MOND) or guess there is dome difficut to see mass (dark matter).
The "blowtorch theory" is only a few general ideas and handwaving, without clear and precice calculations. So it's impossible to know if it explains all the current data (without dark matter) or even if the predictions digree so much with the current data that we need even more weird stuff to match it.
It does make verifiable predictions, and moreover, these predictions are much easier to test than those of string theory, which involves a lot of mathematics but is still not considered a scientific theory because it is impossible to verify
The "single naked" titling is a bit misleading, since there are hundreds of these challenging current theory.
But how often are those we do see are replicated in the so-call smear of lensing? Does this instance (QSO1) presenting 3 times create more analysis opportunities?
E.g., the 7.3-hour observation that produced higher-resolution data that checked out as a vortex of hydrogen: would we expect to see the same features in all three images (modulo lensing transforms)?
Reading that preprint (at [1]), it seemed they only used 1 of 3 (image A).
[1] preprint: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.21748
If you have a material of constant density like water, bananas or rocks, then if you have a ball that is big enough you get a neutron star where all the atoms collapsed in a huge-mega-super-nuclei. (I think the surface may have some normal atoms, and the center may be even more strange.) If the ball is even more big enough you get a black hole. If you use a gas like Hydrogen that has no constant density, the calculation is similar, but more complex.
IANAA, but I expect that the collapse into the black hole does not capture the 100% of the initial mass if the object is a rotating irregular blob, so in this huge cases near the big bang I expect the leftover to form something that looks like a galaxy. And the lack of leftover is what is surprising. (Again, IANAA.)
Except in neutron stars and black holes, atoms are very stable. There are many conservation laws, like the number of leptons (like the electron) and barions (like the proton/neutron) that make it hard to create weird stuff. You can create weird stuff for a very short time, but almost immediately it goes back to normal stuff. As always, there may be some surprise in particle physics, but I don't remember or expect something like this.
Radioactive elements excepted, of course.
And when they get struck by ionizing photons.
So I would rather say: non-radioactive atomic nuclei are stable.
It's not really atoms falling apart into non-atoms.
Is that not an indirect measurement?
However, my understanding of what a naked singularity means is still in conflict with the article. I understood a naked singularity to be a black hole that is larger than its event horizon, such that it's possible to reach the singularity and then come back from it.
Would the Big Bang be a white hole?
It became basically some sort of a pseudo religion.
On a side note Lard Hadron Collider is safe from micro black holes due to Hawking radiation. Issue is, that there does not seem to be any proof for Hawking radiation. It's just a model. Probably correct, but perhaps not. So the argument about LHC safety is flawed from the start and apparently anyone who points this out is "anti science".
Sadly as I wrote science in some parts is a bizarre parody of itself, more like some cult. You cannot point out logical flaws anymore.
Expecting mass downvotes for this post, with no rebuttal.
Because scientists are never wrong. What about (yes - what-aboutism) the reproductivity problem...
If you want to see the actual math, go read textbooks on general relativity and cosmology.
Where is the math in the article? Barely anything.
Do you even have a Putnam?
You could have spent two minutes to find out the actual arguments from scientists regarding the safety of the LHC, but chose not to.
Here it is: https://home.cern/science/accelerators/large-hadron-collider...
> Although theory predicts that microscopic black holes decay rapidly, even hypothetical stable black holes can be shown to be harmless by studying the consequences of their production by cosmic rays.
Note that the article cites critics as well as technical refutations. Your claim that critics were dismissed is baseless.
I believe a healthy dose of humility would be in order.
Cosmic ray black holes are likely to have a momentum and would probably fly out to outer space. While LHC micro black holes would stay on Earth and the potential LHC black hole could eat it. (Assuming Hawking radiation does not exist)
The crits were dismissed because LHC is working.
> Those produced by cosmic rays would pass harmlessly through the Earth into space, whereas those produced by the LHC could remain on Earth. However, there are much larger and denser astronomical bodies than the Earth in the Universe. Black holes produced in cosmic-ray collisions with bodies such as neutron stars and white dwarf stars would be brought to rest. The continued existence of such dense bodies, as well as the Earth, rules out the possibility of the LHC producing any dangerous black holes.
No, the claim was that critics were painted as "anti science" and that Hawking radiation was taken as granted. The link I shared shows that critics were taken seriously and confronted with formal arguments, including the scenario in which black holes are stable.
I made no statements about the safety of the LHC itself.
What logical flaws have you found in the math of the big bang or white holes?
The other commenter wrote that I dont know the math and that "math can be learned from books".
For me quality of comments is even lower than the quality of the article...
Have a nice day
You're implying that people can't handle your brilliant understanding of logical flaws, but you've given no evidence that you even understand the basics.
Since you're writing low quality conspiratorial comments, people are assuming you're just as uninformed as your comments imply. You keep trying to imply that you know more than everybody else and are just unwilling to show it.
So if you have something to say to add to the conversation then now would be the time to do so. Otherwise we'll go on assuming you are just confused.
It's something that isn't well studied, hasn't been observed extensively and potentially destructive.
People always hand-wave destructive potential from their doomsday devices. They made the nuclear bomb FFS.
My personal area of fascination is the time dilation around a black hole. One of those things I assume them who actually study the things(astrophysicists) take into consideration but I almost never see in the popular press. If I understand it correctly, as you fly into a black hole, nice and neat right, will see the rest of the universe quickly age and die before you reach the event horizon. If Hawking radiation is a thing you may see the black hole evaporate in front of you before you can reach it.
I've got a "WTF!" moment there too. The wording is really bad.
If angular momentum exists, you get a galaxy.
Which is probably science-journalist for "has an accretion disk". That enough angular momentum for you?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Bang_nucleosynthesis
Not only that, but getting stars to form using pure hydrogen is tricky. That helium helped early stars collapse and ignite. Not seeing any helium in an early-universe object is a big deal, suggesting some sort of error.
- Corrected an infrequent issue with getResultingProtonCount that would cause it to always return 1 for certain origin bodies.
(In the merge request comments: "This why we don't let junior devs commit unreviewed code to critical branches, guys.")
The gas around it is pure hydrogen. We can't know what's inside. Could be stacks of little green men and ponies in there.
The fact that we can tell that it's hydrogen makes it extremely unlikely that light behaved differently there.
We've marked the comment off-topic and moved some of the replies to be root comments, where appropriate.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HAL_9000
Coincidence? I don't think so. /s
They have always been a mystery, because it's not entirely known how these supermassive black holes could have formed, since the known methods of star collapse have upper bounds on size too small to account for these large black holes. The article mentions two hypotheses, primordial black holes somehow formed in the first second after the big bang, and direct collapse of large gas clouds into a black hole.
It's also very exciting to have an explanation for one of the many many "red dots" that were first spotted by JWST and have been very mysterious. If all these were super massive black holes without galaxies that would be fascinating.