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science@lemmy.worldbySibbo@sopuli.xyz
19 hours

Astronomers discover a new kind of cosmic object – a black hole ‘star’

www.theguardian.com English

cross-posted from: https://sopuli.xyz/post/50636987

See also Wikipedia. Apparently this is the first time a candidate for an object like this was discovered.

13
    The body is the size of the entire solar system and glows with a brilliant red light billions of light years from Earth
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    • CeeBee_Eh@lemmy.worldEnglish
      9 hours

      The title is misleading. It’s not “discovered”, but rather “observed for the first time”. Since black hole stars have been theorized for a while now. And they’re actually the only “accepted” explanation for the origins of super massive black holes holding galaxies together.

        • Sibbo@sopuli.xyzEnglish
          9 hours

          Not even observed for the first time, it’s more like one group of scientists believe that they have observed one with one publication.

        • onyxjet@lemmy.worldEnglish
          13 hours

          In my eyes

          Indisposed

          In disguise

          As no one knows

          Hides the face

          Lies the snake

          The sun

          In my disgrace…

          • melfie@lemmy.zipEnglish
            10 hours

            Wow! JWST is paying dividends like this on a regular basis. It’s amazing what can happen when humans around the world collaborate on something instead being at odds.

            • daggermoon@piefed.worldEnglish
              17 hours

              I think Soundgarden had a song about this.

                • borax7385@lemmy.worldEnglish
                  15 hours

                  And I thought this was the cover of songs in the key of life by Stevie Wonder

                • Apathy Tree@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
                  10 hours

                  I read something a while ago speculating that black holes, and thus the singularity and infinity problems inherent with their existence, may not actually exist.

                  Rather, they were proposed to be basically this, stars which are super dense, and do cause light to fall back into them, but rather than reaching a point of infinite density, the stars themselves lie just beyond the event horizon, so we can’t see them. Totally normal physics, just super hugely massive objects.

                  They called them gravetars, I believe.

                  Edit: gravastar, it turns out. The paper I read was something more recent than 25 years ago, however…

                    • solrize@lemmy.mlEnglish
                      2 hours

                      The GR (general relativity) equations predict a singularity so it’s a big theoretical puzzle. I don’t think anyone believes there’s really a singularity. They just think GR needs correction at the microscopic scale (i.e. quantum gravity) and no one currently knows how to do that. Progress is being made though.

                      Look up “ultraviolet catastrophe” for a historical analogy from thermodynamics.

                    • moldy_rice@piefed.keyboardvagabond.comEnglish
                      12 hours

                      Unrelated: I wonder if AI has had any impact in analyzing the data from James Webb

                        • expr@programming.devEnglish
                          11 hours

                          I suppose it depends on what kind of AI we’re talking about. If you mean LLMs, then I certainly hope no one is trying to do something as foolish as that.

                          A lot of the stuff from James Webb is truly novel, as well, which no AI technology would be useful in understanding.

                            • moldy_rice@piefed.keyboardvagabond.comEnglish
                              17 minutes

                              My understanding is that AI has made surprising success in mathematics in novel unsolved problems.

                              So it does seem apt for this use case

                            • Sibbo@sopuli.xyzEnglish
                              11 hours

                              At least in my field people work with AI to write code and find information, so I assume whoever is making the data analysis for James Webb has done the same.

                              For using neural networks to actually analyse the data I’m not sure, because the goal of these analyses is to understand, and not just to classify. That being said, for known phenomena with lots of training data, neural networks may help. But (not really knowing, but based on my hunches) I would say that they use some explainable and understandable stochastic methods to find candidates for something that was never observed before, such as a black hole star.

                              Feel free to do a literature search and prove me wrong though :)

                            • moldy_rice@piefed.keyboardvagabond.comEnglish
                              12 hours

                              They might be the seeds of present-day supermassive black holes, such as the one at the centre of the Milky Way.

                              Oh fuck oh fuck

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