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Comment by GoblinSlayer | Hacker News Reader

We only have photos of collapsars, not black holes. For mathematics the difference is big, only black holes have peculiar mathematical properties.

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> We only have photos of collapsars

Yes, we have photos of collapsed stars, some of which were above the Tolman–Oppenheimer–Volkoff limit and became black holes. When they are not above it, they either become white dwarf or neutron stars.

Volkoff's calculation demonstrates that a star above the limit begins to collapse. It doesn't support the claim that they already became black holes, especially this can't happen globally with galilean synchronism even under slightly unrealistic assumptions. In the end, it's a mathematical calculation under assumptions; if you want to connect it to reality, you need to understand what it claims exactly and estimate what error is introduced by difference between its assumptions and reality.

That definition requires a higher standard of proof than a Nobel prize committee.

A photo of a star is cool, why not give a prize for it. Or maybe they use attention economy. You can't exactly blame them for attention economy, can you?

Photos as the only evidence of existence are a very convenient way of claming the nonexistence of something that reflects zero light. The baby-out-with-the-bathwater is that it also means there's no proof for anything outside the visible range of light, that's too small to show up on a CCD, or that predates the camera. Or you.

On the other hand, arbitrary conjecture in absence of evidence should be treated exactly as such.

It's worth noting that there are a number of phenomena for which we have built detectors to find this mysterious "dark matter", all of which have failed to turn anything up whatsoever. In fact they are less than useless in that we still don't know if any of the proposed mechanisms can even be ruled out yet. The experiments achieved basically zero information gain in that regard.

Occam's razor flashes bright in the cold dark of space.

The photo is consistent with predictions of general theory of relativity about collapsars, there's no real need to invoke black holes here.

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