Can a black hole really flip a switch on itself? At least one did, since it was caught doing just that in real time.
Phenomena like this just don't happen. That explains the shock a team of MIT astronomers got when they observed a flash of brightness from a supermassive black hole that then dimmed as if someone pulled the plug on it. Then, as if out of nowhere, it restarted like all your electrical appliances after a thunderstorm blackout.
"We expect that luminosity changes this big should vary on timescales of many thousands to millions of years," said Erin Kara , assistant professor of physics at MIT, in a press release . "But in this object, we saw it change by [a factor of] 10,000 over a year, and it even changed by a factor of 100 in eight hours, which is just totally unheard of and really mind-boggling."
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How a Black-Hole Collision Created a Spark of Light - The Atlantic
But black holes don't emit light; they trap it. Entire stars can become shredded and swallowed during an unlucky encounter with a black hole. How could any encounter between two black holes produce the kind of light our eyes can see?
The disk is home to smaller black holes, and sometimes they get close enough to collide. The researchers behind the new paper, published today in Physical Review Letters , believe that when two of these black holes smashed together, the force of the impact warped the space around them and sent gravitational waves rippling outward, like rings in a pond. The black holes merged into a single, larger black hole and shot through the disk of gas, jostling nearby matter and heating it up.
Black hole breakthrough as 'millions could be hiding in plain sight' | Science | News |
But, earlier this year, astronomers spotted a black hole about 1,011 light-years from our Solar System in the star system HR 6819 and it could be the closest to Earth.
Unveiled in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics, the invisible object is locked in an orbit with two visible stars and is estimated to be about four times the mass of the Sun and roughly 2,500 light-years closer than the next black hole.
Kareem El-Badry, a PhD student at the University of California, Berkeley, who specialises in binary star systems told National Geographic: “It seems like it’s been hiding in plain sight.
Cases of black hole mistaken identity
Supermassive black holes grow by pulling in surrounding material, which is heated and produces radiation at a wide range of wavelengths including X-rays. Many astronomers think this growth includes a phase, which happened billions of years ago, when a dense cocoon of dust and gas covers most black holes. These cocoons of material are the fuel source that enables the black hole to grow and generate radiation.
Based on the current picture held by astronomers many black holes immersed in such a cocoon (referred to as "heavily obscured" black holes) should exist. However, this type of growing black hole is notoriously difficult to find, and until now the observed number has fallen short of predictions—even in the deepest images like the CDF-S.
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A Black Hole Popping Out of a Traversable Wormhole Should Give Off a Very Specific Signal in
Gravitational wave astronomy has changed the way we view the cosmos. In only a few years we have observed the collisions of black holes and neutron stars, confirming our theoretical understanding of these strange objects. But as gravitational wave astronomy matures, it will allow us to probe the very nature of space and time itself. While that day is a long way off, it hasn’t stopped the theory folks from dreaming up new discoveries.
Wormholes, on the other hand, are entirely hypothetical. In theory, they are similar to black holes, but rather than a simple hole in space, wormholes would connect one region of space to another. Perhaps they could even connect different universes. They have long been studied by theoretical physicists as a way to test the limits of general relativity.
Monster Black Hole Found in the Early Universe – 1.5 Billion Times More Massive Than Our Sun
An artist’s impression of the quasar Pōniuāʻena. Astronomers discovered this, the second most distant quasar ever found, using the international Gemini Observatory and Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO), Programs of NSF’s NOIRLab. It is the first quasar to receive an indigenous Hawaiian name.
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Systematic searches for these objects have led to the discovery of the most distant quasar (J1342+0928) in 2018 and now the second most distant, J1007+2115 [2] . The A Hua He Inoa program named J1007+2115 Pōniuāʻena, meaning “unseen spinning source of creation, surrounded with brilliance” in the Hawaiian language [3] . The supermassive black hole powering Pōniuāʻena is 1.5 billion times more massive than our Sun.
Black hole discovery: Scientists can now 'easily identify' wormholes in huge
Although this ambition remains a long way off, it has not prevented astronomers from dreaming-up new theories, including how it might look if a black hole and a wormhole interact.
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And they are surrounded by an event horizon trapping anything – even light – that dares venture too close to a black hole.
Wormholes, however, are entirely hypothetical. In theory, they are similar to black holes, but rather than a simple hole in space, wormholes would connect one region of space to another.
Yes, Stephen Hawking Lied To Us All About How Black Holes Decay
Physicist and best-selling author Stephen Hawking presents a program in Seattle in 2012. Although he ... [+] made some tremendous contributions to science, his analogy about black holes decaying has contributed to a generation of misinformed physicists, physics students, and physics enthusiasts.
The features of the event horizon itself, silhouetted against the backdrop of the radio emissions ... [+] from behind it, are revealed by the Event Horizon Telescope in a galaxy some 60 million light-years away. The dotted line represents the edge of the photon sphere, while the event horizon itself is interior even to that. Outside of the event horizon, a small amount of radiation is constantly emitted: Hawking radiation, which will eventually be responsible for this black hole's decay.
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