{"id":589,"date":"2008-08-26T00:41:26","date_gmt":"2008-08-26T05:41:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/arxivblog.com\/?p=589"},"modified":"2008-08-26T00:41:36","modified_gmt":"2008-08-26T05:41:36","slug":"the-ultimate-black-hole-size-limit","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/arxivblog.com\/?p=589","title":{"rendered":"The ultimate black hole size limit"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/arxivblog.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/08\/ultramassive-black-holes.jpg\" title=\"ultramassive-black-holes.jpg\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/arxivblog.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/08\/ultramassive-black-holes.thumbnail.jpg\" alt=\"ultramassive-black-holes.jpg\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>We have a pretty good idea that <a href=\"http:\/\/arxivblog.com\/?p=581\">a supermassive black hole is sitting at the center of our galaxy<\/a>. By supermassive, astronomers mean about 6 millions times as massive as our sun.<\/p>\n<p>That&#8217;s pretty big by any standards but how big can black holes get Is there any limit to how big these monsters can become?<\/p>\n<p>According to Priyamvada Natarajan at Yale University and a pal, the answer is yes.\u00a0 Black holes, they say, cannot be bigger than 10^10 times the mass of the sun. (Or at least, are very unlikely to be bigger than that).<\/p>\n<p>They arrive at this figure by calculating\u00a0 the rate at which a black hole can swallow stuff and how much it could have gorged on since the universe was born, which seem like reasonable limits.<\/p>\n<p>They call these beasts ultramassive black holes and reckon that there should be around 7\u00d710^\u22127 of them per cubic megaparsec in the nearby universe. That&#8217;s not many. Our bast chance of finding one should be to look in the bright, central cluster galaxies in the local universe.<\/p>\n<p>Better start scanning.<\/p>\n<p>Re: <a href=\"http:\/\/arxiv.org\/abs\/0808.2813\">arxiv.org\/abs\/0808.2813<\/a>: Is there an upper limit to black hole masses?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>We have a pretty good idea that a supermassive black hole is sitting at the center of our galaxy. By supermassive, astronomers mean about 6 millions times as massive as our sun. That&#8217;s pretty big by any standards but how big can black holes get Is there any limit to how big these monsters can [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-589","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mountain-climbin","category-stars-in-their-eyes"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/arxivblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/589","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/arxivblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/arxivblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/arxivblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/arxivblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=589"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/arxivblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/589\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/arxivblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=589"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/arxivblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=589"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/arxivblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=589"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}