Missing Black Hole Report: Hundreds Found!

[Dr. Spitzer]

Astronomers have unmasked hundreds of black holes hiding deep inside dusty galaxies billions of light-years away.

 

The massive, growing black holes, discovered by NASA's Spitzer and Chandra space telescopes, represent a large fraction of a long-sought missing population. Their discovery implies there were hundreds of millions of additional black holes growing in our young universe, more than doubling the total amount known at that distance.

 

"Active, supermassive black holes were everywhere in the early universe," said Mark Dickinson of the National Optical Astronomy Observatory in Tucson, Ariz. "We had seen the tip of the iceberg before in our search for these objects. Now, we can see the iceberg itself." Dickinson is a co-author of two new papers appearing in the Nov. 10 issue of the Astrophysical Journal. Emanuele Daddi of the Commissariat a l'Energie Atomique in France led the research.

 

The findings are also the first direct evidence that most, if not all, massive galaxies in the distant universe spent their youths building monstrous black holes at their cores.

 

See the rest: http://www.spitzer.caltech.edu/Media/releases/ssc2007-17/release.shtml

[Norman Albers]

Reading your http, it sounds like they were considered "missing" from theoretic numbers of early galaxy birth and death, as opposed to cosmologic bookkeeping. Does this change much how much must be accounted for in dark ways? It was exciting to read, a few years ago, of diffuse galaxies of low luminosity, being numerous in count. Generally too dust-shrouded to see, if one was as close as Andromeda, it would span quite an impressive angular distance in the night sky! I guess this did not change much the overall cosmologic balance.

[Martin]

... Does this change much how much must be accounted for in dark ways?

 

As far as I can see this discovery would not change the overall balance of darkenergy and (dark and ordinary) matter. From the rest of your post I suspect you have come to the same conclusion on your own, in which case I simply agree.

 

 

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Dr Spitzer, thanks for the press release!

 

from this quote

Daddi and his team initially set out to study 1,000 dusty, massive galaxies that are busy making stars and were thought to lack quasars. The galaxies are about the same mass as our own spiral Milky Way galaxy, but irregular in shape. At 9 to 11 billion light-years away, they existed at a time when the universe was in its adolescence, between 2.5 and 4.5 billion years old.

 

When the astronomers peered more closely at the galaxies with Spitzer's infrared eyes, they noticed that about 200 of the galaxies

 

I gather that they are filling in corroborative detail. the quasars or active supermassive holes had not yet been detected. now they are detected, and it seems to fit with what was already known.

 

actually seems to make structure formation easier to understand----don't have to postulate so many collisions between galaxies to build up the observed concentration of matter.

 

Models of structure formation are not something i know a lot about--- hope we get some more comment from others.

[Norman Albers]

You flatter me but I had no clue. This is all fun. Publication date on that is 2008. (Personally I loved it and I think the Google people did also when I mistakenly dated my paper on gravitation, issued last year, one year in the future. )