Posted on Nov 12, 2024
'Webb has shown us they are clearly wrong': How astrophysicist Sophie Koudmani's research on...
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A supermassive mystery lurks at the center of the Milky Way. Supermassive black holes are gigantic ruptures in space-time that sit in the middle of many galaxies, periodically sucking in matter before spitting it out at near light speeds to shape how galaxies evolve.
Yet how they came to be so enormous is a prevailing mystery in astrophysics, made even deeper by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). Since it came online in 2022, the telescope has found that the cosmic monsters are shockingly abundant and massive in the few million years after the Big Bang — a discovery that defies many of our best models for how black holes grew.
Sophie Koudmani is an astrophysicist at the University of Cambridge searching for answers to this problem. Live Science sat down with her at the New Scientist Live event in London to discuss the cosmic monsters, how they could have formed, and how her work using supercomputers to simulate them could rewrite the history of our universe.
Yet how they came to be so enormous is a prevailing mystery in astrophysics, made even deeper by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). Since it came online in 2022, the telescope has found that the cosmic monsters are shockingly abundant and massive in the few million years after the Big Bang — a discovery that defies many of our best models for how black holes grew.
Sophie Koudmani is an astrophysicist at the University of Cambridge searching for answers to this problem. Live Science sat down with her at the New Scientist Live event in London to discuss the cosmic monsters, how they could have formed, and how her work using supercomputers to simulate them could rewrite the history of our universe.
'Webb has shown us they are clearly wrong': How astrophysicist Sophie Koudmani's research on...
Posted from livescience.com
Posted 1 mo ago
Responses: 3
Posted 1 mo ago
Very cool. It's nice to know that the scientists don't actually know. They just think they know. Meaning they really know almost nothing. LOL
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Posted 1 mo ago
I sometimes wish I had the mental capacity to really understand black holes, quantum entanglement etc. I just know God is awesome in his creation.
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Posted 1 mo ago
Hawking radiation means over time (not in our lifetime) black holes can shrink since the radiation lost has mass. The mass of a black hole is so immense that the loss of radiation mass is so slight on a relative basis that the evaporation of a black hole takes a long, long, long time
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