At Last! Black Holes May Be Detected!

Forgive me for departing from my diatribe regarding “welcoming” guests, but I need to return to my “roots” just for today. You know, of course, that as a closet astrophysicist I really get excited when “new news” arrives regarding the origin of the Milky Way, and other galaxies, which began with as yet unobserved “black holes.”

Avi Loeb of Harvard (that wonderful institution founded to train Preachers), along with his student Xiawei Wang, may have found a way to locate them.

“The Milky Way halo serves as a kind of a ‘reservoir’ of wandering black holes that originally lived in the cores of the small galaxies that merged to make it. But how does one detect them, if it is impossible to observe black holes directly, and they are “rogues” floating somewhere in space? Loeb and Wang say they have found a way. “When such black holes pass through the gas disk of the Milky Way galaxy, they produce a bow shock — similar to the sonic boom produced in the air by supersonic jets,” said Loeb. “The shock accelerates electrons to high energies and these emit radio waves that we can detect. And the radio emission from these bow shocks should be detectable with existing radio observatories,”  he added. “Of course, if such a bow shock is discovered, one would be able to also observe the cluster of stars attached to the floating black hole and possibly the X-ray emission from the black hole itself as it accretes gas.” (Space.com)

Now, beloved friends, when all of the “should’s,” “if”s,” and “possibly’s” happen we can do away with this silly notion that Almighty God spoke into existence this incredible Cosmos and that He lives to control it until His people are glorified in His presence.

At which point, I imagine, He will be happy to explain all about the “high energy radio waves” for which we astrophysicists live and breathe.