Every new thing cosmologists find in space ‘shouldn’t exist’. That’s how they advance science. At this point, this kind of title for this kind of news is so common it even ceased to be a trope. It leaves my spacetime unwrinkled.
Yeah, popmech and popsci have been trash for a while.
I’ll read “physics has a problem” as in like “here’s a math problem to solve.”
There are things they find that should exist. For example we though exoplanets were out there but didn’t find them until a few years ago.
“shouldn’t exist”? More like, “we don’t know how they are formed (yet)”.
I guess the issue would be that there shouldn’t have been enough time to form two black holes that large and have them meet by collisions. So either black holes are more common than thought, or there are other ways for them to form.
The “shouldn’t exist” meant directly through star formation:
“Black holes this massive are forbidden through standard stellar evolution models.”
And ofc the obv explanation:
“One possibility is that the two black holes in this binary formed through earlier mergers of smaller black holes." Hannam said.
(Yes, I am the ‘get off my lawn’ of clickbait science articles.)
It’s worth knowing the context that we only have a few hundred black hole merges detected (which are the only practical detections methods of non-supermassive black hole available to us), so there just isn’t enough data for any statistics yet. Scientists are saying here ‘whoa, this is the biggest merger yet detected’.
Thank you. It can be challenging as a lay person to filter out the clickbait aspects of these articles.
I believe that space has no limits on how big something can be. If there’s enough food to eat on earth, animals tend to be massive. Just look at blue whales. They aren’t restricted to land and can grow in all directions. I’d assume the same is for space with massive planets that are either mineral rich or gas rich. Since black holes devour everything around them I’d imagine there are even bigger ones out there. Fascinating though, I love space.
These actually aren’t big for black holes. The largest ones are billions of solar masses. This is notable because it’s a collision of two black holes, which we can’t observe often.
The article has some confusing phrasing.
Insert Uranus jokes here:
