Space Warps Talk

NON-Feeding Black Holes

  • jrfields47 by jrfields47

    Hello. I am Richard. And I have a question. As we look at these images, its explained in the program intro that most of these lensing affects are caused by massive galaxies or quasars.
    But its also a rare but known fact that non-feeding black holes as they pass over a stars light can also gravitationally lens that stars light. I wonder if the scientist who created this project took that into consideration?

    Posted

  • Budgieye by Budgieye moderator

    Yes, they do weak lensing too

    http://www.cfhtlens.org/public/what-gravitational-lensing

    Posted

  • Tom_Collett by Tom_Collett scientist

    We're talking about this here: http://talk.spacewarps.org/#/boards/BSW0000004/discussions/DSW00000cp

    I think black hole lensing is probably too rare for us to have any chance of detecting it.

    Posted

  • chaoticidealism by chaoticidealism

    I'm pretty sure any ones that we've discovered because they're in binaries with visible stars would just be too washed out by the star's light for any gravitational lens effects to be visible. It'd just disappear into the noise. So I guess it would have to be a stellar-mass black hole all on its lonesome.

    Trouble is, those things are tiny. They're closer to us; there's probably a lot of them in our own galaxy; but I think we'd have to get pretty lucky to have one actually show up in front of a galaxy or star. On the other hand, wouldn't it be so cool if we could find one like that? One where we know where it is, but that doesn't have a binary partner? I don't know how useful it would be, but it would sure be cool.

    Also, I have to admit to a bit of schadenfreude--it'd be funny to see a bunch of people falling over themselves scared it's going to "suck them up" or something. Hehe!

    Posted