N.B. This is a supermassive black hole without a galaxy, not a naked singularity. The cosmic censorship hypothesis is still safe.
I'd certainly hope the headline would be a bit more dramatic if they'd found a naked singularity!
The Universe, modestly redacting its genitals from view since 0 + 1 Planck times.
> “The most plausible explanation seems to be [that] the black hole developed before the galaxy,” said Marta Volonteri (opens a new tab), a theorist at the Paris Institute of Astrophysics who helped with the new analysis of QSO1.
For those that like science communication in video form, Becky Smethurst's YouTube channel has a ton of great info on super massive blackholes, and cosmology in general, from a practitioner in the field. Here's one from a month ago about the evidence (then) for whether super massive black holes or galaxies came first:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B9yDWbilIG4
The science appears to be moving very quickly with all the new info from JWST.
> the early universe was building them in parallel with — or before — galaxies
Reminds me of the "blowtorch theory"[0] discussed here on HN a while ago.
[0]: https://theeggandtherock.com/p/the-blowtorch-theory-a-new-mo...
HN discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44115973 (187 points | 3 months ago | 180 comments)
Note that in spite of the name it's not a "theory" that gives an clear and accurate prediction.
We mix results of many theories, like electromagnetism, general relativity dopler effect, atoms ionization and spectrum, centripetal force, ... to get an accurate prediction and error estimation of how much mass a galaxy must have. Different calculations disagree, so we are forced to try to fix the theory (MOND) or guess there is dome difficut to see mass (dark matter).
The "blowtorch theory" is only a few general ideas and handwaving, without clear and precice calculations. So it's impossible to know if it explains all the current data (without dark matter) or even if the predictions digree so much with the current data that we need even more weird stuff to match it.
> Note that in spite of the name it's not a "theory" that gives an clear and accurate prediction.
It does make verifiable predictions, and moreover, these predictions are much easier to test than those of string theory, which involves a lot of mathematics but is still not considered a scientific theory because it is impossible to verify
I absolutely don't know enough to know how legit or ridiculous that idea is, but it's been stuck in my head ever since I read about it here, and it's been fun to mull over.
So does that mean these naked blackholes are weaker than those surrounding them, hence unable to pull anything towards them?
Not at all, this is the size of a supermassive black hole, 50 million times the mass of the sun, like the one at the center of every galaxy. Sagittarius A*, the super massive black hole at the center of the Milky Way, only has a mass of 4 million suns.
They have always been a mystery, because it's not entirely known how these supermassive black holes could have formed, since the known methods of star collapse have upper bounds on size too small to account for these large black holes. The article mentions two hypotheses, primordial black holes somehow formed in the first second after the big bang, and direct collapse of large gas clouds into a black hole.
It's also very exciting to have an explanation for one of the many many "red dots" that were first spotted by JWST and have been very mysterious. If all these were super massive black holes without galaxies that would be fascinating.
Naive outsider here...
The "single naked" titling is a bit misleading, since there are hundreds of these challenging current theory.
But how often are those we do see are replicated in the so-call smear of lensing? Does this instance (QSO1) presenting 3 times create more analysis opportunities?
E.g., the 7.3-hour observation that produced higher-resolution data that checked out as a vortex of hydrogen: would we expect to see the same features in all three images (modulo lensing transforms)?
Reading that preprint (at [1]), it seemed they only used 1 of 3 (image A).
[1] preprint: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.21748
If the theory of abnormal galaxy formation hold up, then the Big Bang was spitting out both simultaneously. Maybe there’s a mathematical “tipping point” for mass where the weight of it crushes the atoms? Resulting in early black holes from abnormal matter… not from a collapse but just from mass being in close proximity. There still so much to learn…
> “tipping point” for mass where the weight of it crushes the atoms?
If you have a material of constant density like water, bananas or rocks, then if you have a ball that is big enough you get a neutron star where all the atoms collapsed in a huge-mega-super-nuclei. (I think the surface may have some normal atoms, and the center may be even more strange.) If the ball is even more big enough you get a black hole. If you use a gas like Hydrogen that has no constant density, the calculation is similar, but more complex.
IANAA, but I expect that the collapse into the black hole does not capture the 100% of the initial mass if the object is a rotating irregular blob, so in this huge cases near the big bang I expect the leftover to form something that looks like a galaxy. And the lack of leftover is what is surprising. (Again, IANAA.)
Except in neutron stars and black holes, atoms are very stable. There are many conservation laws, like the number of leptons (like the electron) and barions (like the proton/neutron) that make it hard to create weird stuff. You can create weird stuff for a very short time, but almost immediately it goes back to normal stuff. As always, there may be some surprise in particle physics, but I don't remember or expect something like this.
> Except in neutron stars and black holes, atoms are very stable.
Radioactive elements excepted, of course.
And when they get struck by ionizing photons.
So I would rather say: non-radioactive atomic nuclei are stable.
Radioactive atoms are just unstable atoms shedding energy to until they fall into a stable atom state.
It's not really atoms falling apart into non-atoms.
To be fair, everything is stable if we restrict ourselves to their stable subsets.
Not to quote a 90s New Zealand pop hit but… how bizarre!
Primordial black holes seem likely since many models predict them. They’re not a fringe idea.
They are also a dark matter candidate, though this is more controversial. The ones we are seeing here would be huge ones but their masses could range the spectrum. Smaller ones would have evaporated already but there could be tons of asteroid, moon, and planetary mass ones around.
At least some dark matter may be black holes the size of a hydrogen atom with the mass of an asteroid, and similar objects. These would be incredibly hard to detect. The only way would be their gravitational effects on other bodies or weak anomalous radiation bursts when they rarely encounter matter.
They’re also awesome and weird. One could, for example, shoot right through the Earth. If it was small nothing might happen. Larger ones might cause seismic events or perhaps Tunguska type events due to induced fusion in the atmosphere. What was Tunguska anyway?
The most exciting thing is that if small mass PBHs exist and are common enough, we could find one someday in our solar system, maybe captured as a moon or in an asteroid belt. That would be close enough to send a probe to go look at it and do experiments with it. Being able to directly examine a black hole could be the thing that lets us “finish” physics. It would let us see conditions far beyond anything any imaginable terrestrial accelerator could ever produce.
Planetary and moon mass black holes are ruled out by gravitational microlensing surveys. Microlensing puts an upper bound on the mass of primordial black holes at ~1/5 the mass of Ceres.
These surveys assume that primordial black holes are distributed uniformly across galaxies, but this may not be the case if they form small dark globular clusters in the outskirts of galaxies. By small, it is meant that with a total mass of 100–1000 M, they would produce no significant lensing, and by dark, that such clusters would consist entirely of black holes.
It would be an incredible thing if you could build a device that emitted tiny black holes over and over and over again, just strip out horizontal lines of matter
I encountered a theory that 'planet x' might be such a PBH, explaining its ability to gravitationally impact post Neptunian bodies and its elusiveness. Would be incredibly cool to have something so exotic (or commonplace?) so close to home.
Cool idea on Tunguska - would such an explanation make predictions that we could verify? Radioactivity or changes to carbon in stones or the rings of local trees... An interesting thought.
After the Chelyabinsk meteorite, we know that the Tunguska event has a mundane explanation: certain types of meteorites are prone to breaking up in the upper layers of the atmosphere, and Tunguska simply exploded the same way the Chelyabinsk meteorite did
There's several large HN threads about that hypothetical,
https://hn.algolia.com/?query=planet%20black%20hole&type=sto... ("What If Planet 9 Is a Primordial Black Hole?" (+ title variations))
If planet X exists and is a planetary mass PBH it could unlock the universe in many ways. We could use it as a gravitational slingshot to fire probes at significant fractions of the speed of light out for flyby surveys of other solar systems.
It would make a better slingshot than a planet of the same mass?
yes. you can get a lot closer to it.
And you can pick how strong you want the gravity to be up to the event horizon
What's a plausible mechanism for that? There's no net change in speed in a two-body interaction. The conventional slingshot mechanism is a three-body interaction that involves a massive planet's rotation around the sun, but that's a very low speed for Planet 9—much slower than i.e. Jupiter.
Oberth effect is one:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oberth_effect
Fire a super high thrust engine during flyby.
If the PBH were in orbit around the Sun I don’t see why a conventional gravity assist would not work, but an Oberth effect maneuver would be more powerful.
Probably a dumb question but at those energies would we be risking de-orbiting the black hole with such a maneuver?
It’s hard to visualize how weird and extreme black holes are.
A black hole with the mass of the Moon would be smaller than a BB but would have the mass and inertia of the Moon. It would be basically immovable as far as we are concerned. Chuck stuff at it all day and its trajectory change would be so small we probably wouldn’t be able to measure it.
That makes sense, thanks!
No, for the same reason slingshotting on a planetary body now has no significant effect on it. The mass difference is too enormous.
no. if it has the mass of a planet, it has the inertia of a planet
as a connoisseur of all the outlets (YouTube and other publications) that make really tough astrophysics easy for the layman I just love this. I've seen everything I could understand on YouTube about blackholes. I just find them so fascinating. And this is really, really cool.
I thought a naked singularity was a white hole, one without an event horizon. And physicists hate that idea, but expect to never find one anyway.
The only white hole we know of is the universe itself
A white hole is a completely different object, the opposite of a black hole, not a baked singularity. A white hole is an area of spacetime that no mass/energy (even light) can ever reach - versus a black hole which no mass/energy can escape.
However, my understanding of what a naked singularity means is still in conflict with the article. I understood a naked singularity to be a black hole that is larger than its event horizon, such that it's possible to reach the singularity and then come back from it.
Being charged and or rotating changes the dynamics of where the event horizon is in interesting ways, If I understand it correctly it forms a sort of shell where you have two event horizons one inside the other. and the theory being that if enough energy(charge and/or rotational) is present the two event horizons will meet leaving your naked singularity. Nice and neat, the main problem being the absurd amount of energy required.
My personal area of fascination is the time dilation around a black hole. One of those things I assume them who actually study the things(astrophysicists) take into consideration but I almost never see in the popular press. If I understand it correctly, as you fly into a black hole, nice and neat right, will see the rest of the universe quickly age and die before you reach the event horizon. If Hawking radiation is a thing you may see the black hole evaporate in front of you before you can reach it.
That's fascinating. So how does a black hole "feed" and grow if matter never enters it because of the time dilation? Or is it that weird perspective thing, where from an outsider's perspective the matter enters the black hole and the hole grows, but from the matter's perspective time dilates and it never gets to the hole?
> A white hole is an area of spacetime that no mass/energy (even light) can ever reach
Would the Big Bang be a white hole?
IIRC the math is in fact very similar if not identical between a white hole and the Big Bang. But I don't actually know the math, so...
No one ever shows the math anywhere. They just write that it is hard, or that it doesnt work.
It became basically some sort of a pseudo religion.
On a side note Lard Hadron Collider is safe from micro black holes due to Hawking radiation. Issue is, that there does not seem to be any proof for Hawking radiation. It's just a model. Probably correct, but perhaps not. So the argument about LHC safety is flawed from the start and apparently anyone who points this out is "anti science".
Sadly as I wrote science in some parts is a bizarre parody of itself, more like some cult. You cannot point out logical flaws anymore.
Expecting mass downvotes for this post, with no rebuttal.
Because scientists are never wrong. What about (yes - what-aboutism) the reproductivity problem...
You are in no position to throw accusations considering the amount of misinformation you are spreading.
You could have spent two minutes to find out the actual arguments from scientists regarding the safety of the LHC, but chose not to.
Here it is: https://home.cern/science/accelerators/large-hadron-collider...
> Although theory predicts that microscopic black holes decay rapidly, even hypothetical stable black holes can be shown to be harmless by studying the consequences of their production by cosmic rays.
Note that the article cites critics as well as technical refutations. Your claim that critics were dismissed is baseless.
I believe a healthy dose of humility would be in order.
If you actually would read the discourse more than a google search it was that:
Cosmic ray black holes are likely to have a momentum and would probably fly out to outer space. While LHC micro black holes would stay on Earth and the potential LHC black hole could eat it. (Assuming Hawking radiation does not exist)
The crits were dismissed because LHC is working.
They're addressing that:
> Those produced by cosmic rays would pass harmlessly through the Earth into space, whereas those produced by the LHC could remain on Earth. However, there are much larger and denser astronomical bodies than the Earth in the Universe. Black holes produced in cosmic-ray collisions with bodies such as neutron stars and white dwarf stars would be brought to rest. The continued existence of such dense bodies, as well as the Earth, rules out the possibility of the LHC producing any dangerous black holes.
> You cannot point out logical flaws anymore.
What logical flaws have you found in the math of the big bang or white holes?
The article has no math. In my opinion this makes the level of discourse low.
The other commenter wrote that I dont know the math and that "math can be learned from books".
For me quality of comments is even lower than the quality of the article...
Have a nice day
Well certainly the quality of your comments is very low. You're just repeating low-effort anti-science rhetoric.
You're implying that people can't handle your brilliant understanding of logical flaws, but you've given no evidence that you even understand the basics.
Since you're writing low quality conspiratorial comments, people are assuming you're just as uninformed as your comments imply. You keep trying to imply that you know more than everybody else and are just unwilling to show it.
So if you have something to say to add to the conversation then now would be the time to do so. Otherwise we'll go on assuming you are just confused.
the math is written out all the time, pick up decent grad level GR and QM textbooks and the tensor equations will be right there for you. the fact you don't understand the math isn't the fault of the evil physicists
Ah right personal attacks because I wrote that the quality of those articles is low. Apparently I dont understand the math...
Where is the math in the article? Barely anything.
Do you even have a Putnam?
The math relevant to OP is accessible via the second link in the text: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.21748 I guess you might have to follow some citations too. But we were on a tangent about white holes, which would be unreasonable to expect in the article. I and the other reply have already told you where to find that math.
I definitely feel like the timeline we're in has gotten worse and worse since the LHC fired up. Pretty soon all the ones that aren't apocalyptic are gonna be eaten up by black holes.
The hell are you even talking about? You won't get a rebuttal because you haven't even said anything to rebut.
If you want to see the actual math, go read textbooks on general relativity and cosmology.
Note that the article doesn't call it a naked singularity.
I've got a "WTF!" moment there too. The wording is really bad.
”By reconstructing the vortex, the team directly measured the mass of the object it was orbiting: 50 million times more massive than our sun.”
Is that not an indirect measurement?
It is the most direct measurement that astronomers have. That said, I do agree that the word "directly" should not have been in that sentence.
Even scales measure indirectly.
I didn't see any mention of angular momentum. If a gas cloud has essentially no angular momentum relative to its center of mass, it will collapse directly into a BH, no?
If angular momentum exists, you get a galaxy.
There are a bazillion ways to rotate but only one way to not rotate. I'd say that the probability of a gas cloud without angular momentum is as low as to be indistinguishable from zero.
It's all spinning around the BH, and spins faster the closer to the BH it is. It was actually the core point of this particular experiment to measure how fast it's spinning; the paper's title is "A direct black hole mass measurement...", and the way they're doing that is "dynamical BH mass measurement"—i.e. measuring how fast gas spins around it, and applying kinematic laws.
> The scientists found that bright material — likely hot gas — swirled around in a furious vortex, one that backed up Furtak’s preliminary findings.
Which is probably science-journalist for "has an accretion disk". That enough angular momentum for you?
It's effectively impossible to have no angular momentum with these processes.
Have the black hole primal and then "naked" due to the early, rapid expansion?
When primordial black holes formed, there was no matter that could clump around them, as the matter at that time had a very high temperature
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> It’s pure hydrogen
The gas around it is pure hydrogen. We can't know what's inside. Could be stacks of little green men and ponies in there.
Arguably, it makes no difference at all as to what's inside (apart from the inference that the early universe had lots of singularity seeking ponies and little green men)
Maybe, lazy or tired light, and everything shifts towards specific spectral lines or frequencies/wavelengths at distant observation. Attenuates? Asymptotes to the hydrogen line?
If light got tired it would make ordinary chemistry impossible. You wouldn't see spectra because atoms themselves would work differently (and probably not at all).
The fact that we can tell that it's hydrogen makes it extremely unlikely that light behaved differently there.
that doesn't work out. from the spectra we're seeing hydrogen spikes red shifted, so the lack of any other spikes is very strong evidence
!
Was it wrong, or based on incomplete data?
In most fields it's impossible to have complete data.
If you draw conclusions from incomplete data, they tend to be wrong. Even Prof. van Dusen and Sherlock Holmes knew that. So if there were any difference, it would be sheer luck.
Both at the same time? Weird question.
Well, the black hole isnt hydrogen. This is the gas around it. And being pure hydrogen seems sus as there should be some helium in there according to most models.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Bang_nucleosynthesis
Not only that, but getting stars to form using pure hydrogen is tricky. That helium helped early stars collapse and ignite. Not seeing any helium in an early-universe object is a big deal, suggesting some sort of error.
Bug fixes:
- Corrected an infrequent issue with getResultingProtonCount that would cause it to always return 1 for certain origin bodies.
(In the merge request comments: "This why we don't let junior devs commit unreviewed code to critical branches, guys.")
Thanks , very helpful.
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Am I the only one to see HALs eye here.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HAL_9000
Coincidence? I don't think so. /s
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You are regurgitating almost pure grievance against people who just want to study the universe.
Every researcher in every field all the time wants more data, better studies, more evidence. That is basically what science is.
This attitude about "those damn smug scientists who think they know everything" emerges from authoritarian nationalists selling resentment politics, and it has led to widespread violence against scientists in the past. Its prevalence in Germany is one part of why the US got the bomb first, and its prevalence in the Soviet and Chinese systems is part of why were not able to keep up with us economically (until recently).
This political project actively intends to defend enterprises like JWST (sometimes even after building and launching the damn thing!), and current budgets have dozens of existing projects being shut down for good.
I assume you mean "defund."
Another thing people are unaware of is that the majority of scientists are experimentalists, not theoreticians. Why would we want to be experimental scientists at all?
"Scientists having to face the fact that their theories aren't perfect" - I think you fundamentally misunderstand how science works, or else you hang out with some extremely arrogant astronomers.
Why do you think they put the JWST up there, if not to get better data and thereby improve our understanding of the universe? If we thought our theories were already perfect, what would be the point in doing more research?
> Why do you think they put the JWST up there, if not to get better data and thereby improve our understanding of the universe?
Think about how much effort scientists had to make, to bring JWST into existence. The funding proposals, the design, the engineering to get it launched. Generations of effort, entire careers dedicated just to making it happen. All of that effort sings one song: we don’t know, and we want to learn.
"Face the fact"? These scientists are very excited to find a whole new era of the universe that they don't understand:
> QSO1 and the rest of the little red dots “tell us we don’t know anything,” said John Regan, a theorist at Maynooth University in Ireland. “It has been really exciting and very electrifying for the field.”
This is pure candy to a scientist. "Holy crap, we have no idea what this object is or how it formed" was always the hoped-for outcome for the JWST. Nobody wanted to see more of the same, especially not for the price.
We don't actually think about our theories that way. Any apparent certainty is just an illusion.
I don't even know where to begin.
JWST didn't just "happen". It was conceptualized, designed, built and launched by the very scientists who wanted to test and improve their theories. No serious scientist thinks that their theories are perfect or that they have all the answers. Quite the opposite, usually. They're constantly challenging each other and themselves with the common goal of approximating reality with their models better and better. Science would never have come as far as it did if it were any different.
Where does this sheer ignorance come from? Clearly you've never worked with scientists in any capacity.
Who do you think specified, designed and built jwst? conspiracy theorists?
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