Talk:Q0906+6930

Fixed numbers

Per a discussion at Talk:Supermassive black hole, I've tracked down the Astrophysics Journal paper and tweaked the numbers in this article to be more accurate than those given in the space.com article. Mass was estimated to be $10^{10.2}$ solar masses, which is about 16 billion. As Milky Way gives a galactic mass of about 580 billion solar masses, backed up by many citations, I corrected the "about the mass of the galaxy" line to something closer to reality (space.com was flat-out wrong about it). Calculating volume of the black hole by comparing Schwarzschild radius to the semimajor radius of Neptune's orbit does give a volume ratio very close to 1000, so I left that intact, but it's very, very sensitive to radius. I did not include uncertainties in any of the corrected numbers, because there isn't an external source cited, but tracing the calculations in the paper gives about a 20% uncertainty in mass, which results in a 20% uncertainty in radius, and a volume ratio anywhere from 600 to 2100 at one radius standard deviation. --Christopher Thomas 16:42, 8 March 2007 (UTC)