Survey of Super Massive Black Holes Completed

eldavojohn writes "NASA has announced the completion of a survey of nearby supermassive black holes. Every galaxy that revolves around a supermassive black hole within 400 light-years of our own galaxy has been cataloged. From the article: 'Called active galactic nuclei, or AGN, these black holes have masses of up to billions of Suns compressed into a region about the size of our solar system. The all-sky census, performed using NASA's Swift satellite over a nine-month period, detected more than 200 nearby AGN.' I'm starting to feel very lucky to have grown up in the Milky Way Galaxy."

Is this survey to be trusted?

[EmbeddedJanitor]

Considering our space boffins have a problem seeing large asteroids really close up -- not even one light second away -- http://www.cnn.com/2002/TECH/space/06/20/asteroid. miss/ [cnn.com] why should we believe that they have seen all the black holes many light years away?

Re:relativity

[Tablizer]

The average density of a supermassive black hole can be very low, and may actually be lower than the density of water.

That sounds suspicious, especially coming from wikipedia. Something with a density that low could not likely bend light enough to keep it from escaping, even if very large.
       

On Purpose?

[tokki]

I wonder if the editors purposefully put factual errors in there just to sit back and watch the orgie of "OMG NO THATS WRONG" comments that invariably follow. 400 light years? Of course it's a mistake. Is there anyone who reads /. that doesn't know that 400 light years is a little close for a galaxy? Of course, there are those that get positively horny over the propsect of correcting factual errors.

Because hey, trivia = intelligence, right?

Re:400 light years isn't that far...

[empesey]

> I thought we couldn't measure our universe?

Really, we only have to measure half of it and multiply 2.