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An all-sky map of half a million supermassive black holes

https://www.sdss.org/black-hole-mapper-release-20/
44•MarcoDewey•1h ago

Comments

purpleflame1257•42m ago
Interesting how anisotropic it is. Naively I would have assumed it would be roughly symmetrical
monocasa•38m ago
I think that's more a result of our incomplete/inconsistent scanning.
gwerbin•27m ago
On the other hand, the ancients assumed there had to be big continents in the southern and western hemispheres to "balance" the land in their own quadrant.

They turned out to be right, but not quite for the reasons they put forth.

As a non-cosmologist, I'm unwilling to speculate on what "should" be out there, because my mental model is probably very wrong (keeping in mind that our best models of what's happening out there are also probably quite wrong).

mynegation•37m ago
Interesting indeed but might be an artifact of regions being surveilled and Milky Way disk both containing more easily detectable holes and obscuring some areas with the dust clouds (I am not an astrophysicist or astronomer)
smolder•11m ago
Supermassive black holes are generally at the center of galaxies, like a tiny yolk in an egg. That's not a hard rule. For instance, they can theoretically be ejected and make a mess if a few galaxies collide. But yes, it's generally harder to detect far away objects when the bulk of our milky way is in the way, making things milky. I suspect there are a lot of black holes back there that we just can't see.
epistasis•26m ago
As others say, this is probably mostly artifacts from the survey design (e.g. eROSITA data rights), but the Galactic plane definitely limits things too.

This video of the DESI galactic map shows the directions that are possible to survey with optical light, in a very cool way:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VSTGiRLWzS4

Razengan•37m ago
Thanks, now I know where not to go
epistasis•32m ago
The number of massive maps of the universe in recent years are absoultely fascinating, and have reignited my childhood interest in astronomy and cosmology.

Having a large number of statistical observations lines up with all the data analysis I've used in the past decades in genomics, and the plots I see in these papers are looking increasingly like the plots I've produced over the past 20 years, so I'm thinking maybe it would be fun to download a few TB of atlas and see if I can reproduce their plots...

Thanks for everyone who works in this field, it's fantastic work that's reshaping our very understanding of reality.

greenleafone7•5m ago
Scary as well though. All those cosmic powers, and here we are, not even ants standing on a hilltop.
colkassad•31m ago
Anyone ever worked with data from SDSS? What have you done with it? I imagine it's a gold mine for university students. I took an astronomy class and was able to plot the largest structures in the universe from their data, which was cool but pretty basic. I've loved astronomy all my life and I've always wondered if there was anything more one person or a small team could do with SDSS data. I took the class in 2010 so I imagine there are more possibilities now with AI?
gwerbin•29m ago
What are the "gridded" regions in the middle? Is that some kind of measurement artifact?
xioxox•2m ago
We also released the 2nd half sky catalogue of the eROSITA X-ray survey at the same time, for 1.5 years of operations. Here is a sky map and 3D plot with redshift: https://www.mpe.mpg.de/8215311/news20260731

This almost doubled the number of known X-ray sources to 2 million.

An all-sky map of half a million supermassive black holes

https://www.sdss.org/black-hole-mapper-release-20/
44•MarcoDewey•1h ago•13 comments

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