Question:
What is the latest on latest on black hole discovery?
What ere are we looking for (with Hubble) for new sources of possible
Black holes?
Replies:
There is lots of new data from Hubble that indicates black holes in
near by galaxies. Latest data indicates that M87 may have a very clean example.
My reading is that we will be able to get the mass and size from velocity
measurements of gas speeds. It should be very interesting.
Samuel P Bowen
There's an article entitled "Where have all the black holes gone?" in
the October issue of Astronomy magazine which you may want to read. It says that
at this time there are only about three good candidates for black holes formed
from the collapse of single stars; one of them isn't even in our galaxy, but in the Large
Magellanic Cloud. Astronomers believe that there should be 1 black hole for
every 3 neutron stars; since more than 500 neutron stars are known, there should
be a lot more than three black holes! At least part of the problem, as this arti cle describes, is the
difficulty in detecting black holes.
As Sam Bowen says in his response, there was reported (last June by a group of
astronomers led by Holland Ford, using the Hubble 'scope) "conclusive evidence"
of a massive (perhaps 3 billion solar masses) black hole in the giant elliptical
galaxy M87. Some astronomers believe that many, perhaps most, galaxies have such massive black
holes at their centers.
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