AAS News
Oh my! Run for your lives!
Bmpbmp, check it out!
Vanderbilt University press release: Galaxy may hold hundreds of rogue black holes (via Eurekalert)
Quote:
If the latest simulation of what happens when black holes merge is correct, there could be hundreds of rogue black holes, each weighing several thousand times the mass of the sun, roaming around the Milky Way galaxy.
“Rogue black holes like this would be very difficult to spot,” says Vanderbilt astronomer Kelly Holley-Bockelmann, who is presenting the results of the supercomputer simulation at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society on Jan. 9 in Austin, Texas. Much of the research was done at Penn State University in collaboration with Deirdre Shoemaker and Nicolas Yunes before Holley-Bockelmann moved to Vanderbilt. Kayhan Gultekin at the University of Michigan also participated in the study.
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Of course, the media is tying this to alarmist titles:
Expert warns of 'rogue' black holes
Rogue Black Holes Might Fill Our Galaxy
And the press release actually ends with calming reassurance:
Quote:
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Fortunately, the existence of a few rogue black holes in the neighborhood does not present a major danger. “These rogue black holes are extremely unlikely to do any damage to us in the lifetime of the universe,” Holley-Bockelmann stresses. “Their danger zone, the Schwarzschild radius, is really tiny, only a few hundred kilometers. There are far more dangerous things in our neighborhood!”
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Like fear itself?