It would likely be stronger than bigger black holes found at the centers of galaxies. Shaposhnikov said if someone ventured too close to J1650, its gravity would "stretch your body into a strand of spaghetti."
J1650 is the "name" of the black hole, Shaposhnikov is one of the NASA scientists who discovered it. His quote is fine - indeed, if you get too close to any black hole you would get stretched long and thin like a strand of spaghetti. It's the first sentence I have a problem with. The author of this article, Maggie Fox (who is, at best, a science reporter, and not a scientist), never explains what she means by this black hole being stronger than others. The strength of a black hole depends only on its mass, not anything else. Therefore this should be the weakest black hole ever found, and certainly not stronger than the super-massive black holes found at the centers of galaxies - those are millions of times more massive than our Sun.
Shaposhnikov and his Goddard colleague Lev Titarchuk used NASA's Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer satellite and a new method to estimate the size of the black hole, found in a system in the southern constellation Ara, in our own Milky Way Galaxy.
This is misleading - the size of a black hole is actually infinitesimally small, at least that's what our current knowledge of physics tells us. You can't give the size of the black hole itself, but you can talk about the size of its event horizon, which is the point of no return for black holes - if anything crosses a black hole's event horizon, that object will never get out. The size of a black hole's event horizon is given by a fairly simple equation, and is called the Schwarschild Radius, after the scientist who first did the calculation. What these two scientists likely did was first find an object and determine it's mass by watching gases that orbit the object. Knowing its mass alone does not tell you whether or not the object is a black hole, however. That's probably where their technique came in - they used it to find the maximum possible size for this object, and since that size is so small, the only thing the object could possibly be is a black hole.
It measures the oscillation of hot gas piling up near the black hole as it sucks in matter, they told a meeting in Los Angeles of the American Astronomical Society High-Energy Astrophysics Division.
No, they didn't. I admit, I have no idea what they actually said, but I highly doubt they said anything about the black hole "sucking" - BLACK HOLES DON'T SUCK!!!! They don't. Sure, if something falls onto a black hole, it won't come out again, ever. But black holes don't actively suck material into them. The force of gravity works just the same near a black hole as it would near a star of the same mass.
A collapsing star that was much smaller than J1650 would likely form a neutron star and not a black hole, the researchers said.
I have two problems with this sentence. First, the word "smaller" is ambiguous. Do they mean a star with a smaller mass, or a star with a smaller size? A star with a smaller size doesn't make sense - such stars do not exist! So I must assume that they meant a star with a smaller mass. That poses a problem, as well. It has been well established that any star that starts with a mass up to 8 or 10 times the mass of our Sun will end it's life as a white dwarf. Only stars more massive than that will eventually become either a neutron star or a black hole. Of course, they are talking about a collapsing star, here, by which I assume they mean the core of the star that is left over after a massive star has gone supernova. Such a remnant needs to be about 3 times the mass of our Sun to become a black hole, otherwise it will become a neutron star.
See any more problems with the article? Let me know!
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