Talk:Intermediate-mass black hole

First line

The first line of this article totally contradicts the first line the article to which it also refers the reader, the article on stellar mass black holes — Preceding unsigned comment added by 92.22.126.226 (talk) 14:20, 10 September 2012 (UTC)

Size Distribution Graph?

Intermediate-mass black holes appear to be much less common than stellar-size black holes and also rarer than galaxy-sized black holes. But how much rarer? It would be very useful to include a table, or preferably a graph, showing the number of black holes detected or predicted at each order of magnitude from the smallest detected hole size to the largest [ie across 9 orders of magnitude from 1.4 to 18 billion stellar masses] --Tediouspedant (talk) 13:30, 7 February 2010 (UTC)

The answer to this is simply that it is not known. There isn't even enough information to make a meaningful guess. Especially across 9 orders of magnitude. The mass of black holes is not a very precise measurement to begin with. Supermassive black holes can have margins of error of the order of billions of solar masses depending on the method used to estimate its mass. So 9 orders of magnitude is impossible (I'm not sure why you chose 9 and how you propose to categorize them but if you are talking about a mass greater then 100 billion solar masses then there are none in that category to warrant the category). However when comparing the numbers of stellar mass black holes to supermassive black holes just look at the Milky Way Galaxy. There is only one known supermassive black hole candidate to all the stellar mass black holes. This ratio would likely exist no matter the size of the Galaxy. But to come up with what you would like to see done would involve a lot of guessing and assumptions making the numbers not very meaningful scientifically.

Reading into the future?

Reference 1 appears to have been published by ESA News on Jan 3, 2007 but retrieved on 2006-05-24. Unless this is the first evidence of somebody able to read into the future, there must be some typing mistake.--Franco3450 (talk) 19:27, 6 June 2009 (UTC)

Confused over new report

I'm a bit confused after reading a new article here, seeing the same date of discovery in the article for GCIRS 13E and this new article's HLX-1 object. Are these the same celestial objects, or a coincidence in discovery dates, with HLX-1 still not mentioned in the article? — Northgrove 09:33, 2 July 2009 (UTC)

No, it's a different object. HLX-1 is 20,000 solar masses, while GCIRS 13E is 1,300 solar masses. Also, HLX-1 is a part of ESO 243-49, while GCIRS 13E orbits Sagittarius A*. I'd have to agree with you on saying its pretty unusual for such similar rare objects to be discovered in such a short time frame. DarthBotto _talk•cont 20:04, 16 February 2012 (UTC)

The rarity of such objects is conjecture on your part based on very little evidence to support it. They may be rare or they may be much less rare then you think. It's also worth noting that the mass of such objects can often turn out to be wrong on the first guess. But assuming these are 100% accurate it still doesn't mean that these objects are as rare as you suppose they are. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 50.182.204.242 (talk) 21:51, 4 July 2015 (UTC)

Okay, thanks for your opinion... Why does this matter, when I simply stated my perspective on a talk page three years ago? DARTHBOTTO _talk•cont 21:24, 10 August 2015 (UTC)

Origin

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quasi-star suggests a different, not listed origin for intermediate-mass black holes. - Anon — Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.192.205.199 (talk) 00:00, 13 January 2018 (UTC)

Scientific notation for 100?

The use of scientific notation in this article is odd. Usually the point of SI is to prevent unwieldy rows of zeros from occurring. But there is only one number (10⁹) that to me seems reasonable to shorten that way. I'm sure I've never seen 100 or 10,000 written as 10² or 10⁴ before. I'll change it if no one objects. --Algr (talk) 08:47, 7 September 2020 (UTC)

@Algr: If you're referring to "mass in the range 10²–10⁵ solar masses" in the opening paragraph, the use of SI units is fine here. There's no hard cut-off point between stellar-mass, intermediate and supermassive BHs; this only refers to an order-of-magnitude range, not strictly 10-100,000. DanTickner (talk) 20:38, 5 December 2020 (UTC)

Well, that is 10⁰ ways of looking at it. Algr (talk) 02:45, 7 December 2020 (UTC)