A single, 'naked' black hole confounds theories of the young cosmos

https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-single-naked-black-hole-rewrites-the-history-of-the-universe-20250912/

by pykello • 10 months ago

196 91 10 months ago

quantamagazine.org

andreareina• 10 months ago

N.B. This is a supermassive black hole without a galaxy, not a naked singularity. The cosmic censorship hypothesis is still safe.

yawpitch• 10 months ago

The Universe, modestly redacting its genitals from view since 0 + 1 Planck times.

Quarrel• 10 months ago

I'd certainly hope the headline would be a bit more dramatic if they'd found a naked singularity!

boopity2025• 10 months ago

[flagged]

sandworm101• 10 months ago

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.

felbane• 10 months ago

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.")

Cthulhu_• 10 months ago

Was it wrong, or based on incomplete data?

tempodox• 10 months ago

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.

perching_aix• 10 months ago

Both at the same time? Weird question.

HPsquared• 10 months ago

In most fields it's impossible to have complete data.

BugsJustFindMe• 10 months ago

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.

ndsipa_pomu• 10 months ago

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)

catchclose2• 10 months ago

Maybe, lazy or tired light, and everything shifts towards specific spectral lines or frequencies/wavelengths at distant observation. Attenuates? Asymptotes to the hydrogen line?

PantaloonFlames• 10 months ago

Thanks , very helpful.

tomhow• 10 months ago

A user emailed us to point out that this seems to be an LLM-generated summary of the article that contains inaccuracies. Please don't do this.

We've marked the comment off-topic and moved some of the replies to be root comments, where appropriate.

codethief• 10 months ago

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...

gus_massa2• 10 months ago

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.

zero_bias5• 10 months ago

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

farnsworth• 10 months ago

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.

cluckindan• 10 months ago

”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?

dotancohen• 10 months ago

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.

actionfromafar• 10 months ago

Even scales measure indirectly.

reactordev2• 10 months ago

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…

gus_massa2• 10 months ago

“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.

IAmBroom2• 10 months ago

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.

reactordev2• 10 months ago

Not to quote a 90s New Zealand pop hit but… how bizarre!

Towaway69• 10 months ago

Am I the only one to see HALs eye here.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HAL_9000

Coincidence? I don't think so. /s

api4• 10 months ago

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.

WaxProlix• 10 months ago

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.

api4• 10 months ago

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.

perihelions4• 10 months ago

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))

zero_bias5• 10 months ago

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

thehappypm• 10 months ago

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

antognini• 10 months ago

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.

zero_bias5• 10 months ago

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.

a3w• 10 months ago

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.

tsimionescu• 10 months ago

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.

JumpCrisscross2• 10 months ago

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?

somat• 10 months ago

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.

marcosdumay• 10 months ago

Note that the article doesn't call it a naked singularity.

I've got a "WTF!" moment there too. The wording is really bad.

zero_bias5• 10 months ago

The only white hole we know of is the universe itself

graycat• 10 months ago

Have the black hole primal and then "naked" due to the early, rapid expansion?

zero_bias5• 10 months ago

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

w10-1• 10 months ago

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

gigatexal• 10 months ago

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.

dreamcompiler• 10 months ago

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.

andrewflnr4• 10 months ago

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?

pantulis• 10 months ago

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.

1270018080• 10 months ago

It's effectively impossible to have no angular momentum with these processes.

perihelions4• 10 months ago

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.

epistasis2• 10 months ago

“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.

robofanatic• 10 months ago

So does that mean these naked blackholes are weaker than those surrounding them, hence unable to pull anything towards them?

epistasis2• 10 months ago

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.

Dr_Loo• 10 months ago

Symbolic Nakedness at Cosmic Dawn: SFIT Validation on A2744-QSO1 and the Little Red Dot Phase We introduce the concept of symbolic nakedness within the SFIT (Symbolic Field Invariant Topology) framework and evaluate it using recent observations of A2744-QSO1, a triply imaged, high-redshift quasar candidate at $z\sim7$. In SFIT, symbolic nakedness is defined by a quadruple criterion: (i) horizon breach, quantified by $H(r)=2M(r)/r>1$; (ii) localized collapse intensity, $\rho(s)>\rho_{\max}$; (iii) entropic flux leakage, $L(\Omega)>\varepsilon$; and (iv) absence of topological shielding. Applying this diagnostic to the “Little Red Dot” phase of QSO1, we find all four conditions satisfied: the inferred black hole mass ($\sim 5\times10^{7},M_\odot$) exceeds containment limits, spectral features imply steep gradients, X-ray weakness and Balmer-line strength indicate non-standard flux, and no host bulge or enclosing structure is detected. Within SFIT, QSO1 therefore represents a symbolically naked singularity. The framework is falsifiable: discovery of a massive host or standard X-ray corona would negate this classification. More generally, symbolic nakedness provides a cross-domain diagnostic for unshielded structural collapse, from molecular entanglement to primordial black holes.