The concept of a black hole is known to everyone - from schoolchildren to the elderly; it is used in science and fiction literature, in the yellow media and at scientific conferences. But what exactly such holes are is not known to everyone.
From the history of black holes
1783 The first hypothesis of the existence of such a phenomenon as a black hole was put forward in 1783 by the English scientist John Michell. In his theory, he combined two of Newton's creations - optics and mechanics. Michell's idea was this: if light is a stream of tiny particles, then, like all other bodies, the particles should experience the attraction of a gravitational field. It turns out that the more massive the star, the more difficult it is for light to resist its attraction. 13 years after Michell, the French astronomer and mathematician Laplace put forward (most likely independently of his British colleague) a similar theory.
1915 However, all their works remained unclaimed until the beginning of the 20th century. In 1915, Albert Einstein published the General Theory of Relativity and showed that gravity is the curvature of spacetime caused by matter, and a few months later, German astronomer and theoretical physicist Karl Schwarzschild used it to solve a specific astronomical problem. He explored the structure of curved space-time around the Sun and rediscovered the phenomenon of black holes.
(John Wheeler coined the term "Black holes")
1967 American physicist John Wheeler outlined a space that can be crumpled, like a piece of paper, into an infinitesimal point and designated it with the term “Black Hole”.
1974 British physicist Stephen Hawking proved that black holes, although they absorb matter without return, can emit radiation and eventually evaporate. This phenomenon is called “Hawking radiation”.
2013 The latest research into pulsars and quasars, as well as the discovery of cosmic microwave background radiation, has finally made it possible to describe the very concept of black holes. In 2013, the gas cloud G2 came very close to the black hole and will most likely be absorbed by it, observing a unique process provides enormous opportunities for new discoveries of the features of black holes.
(The massive object Sagittarius A*, its mass is 4 million times greater than the Sun, which implies a cluster of stars and the formation of a black hole)
2017. A group of scientists from the multi-country collaboration Event Horizon Telescope, connecting eight telescopes from different points on the Earth’s continents, observed a black hole, which is a supermassive object located in the M87 galaxy, constellation Virgo. The mass of the object is 6.5 billion (!) solar masses, gigantic times larger than the massive object Sagittarius A*, for comparison, with a diameter slightly less than the distance from the Sun to Pluto.
Observations were carried out in several stages, starting in the spring of 2017 and throughout the periods of 2018. The volume of information amounted to petabytes, which then had to be decrypted and a genuine image of an ultra-distant object obtained. Therefore, it took another two whole years to thoroughly process all the data and combine them into one whole.
2019 The data was successfully decrypted and displayed, producing the first ever image of a black hole.
(The first ever image of a black hole in the M87 galaxy in the constellation Virgo)
The image resolution allows you to see the shadow of the point of no return in the center of the object. The image was obtained as a result of ultra-long baseline interferometric observations. These are so-called synchronous observations of one object from several radio telescopes interconnected by a network and located in different parts of the globe, directed in the same direction.
What black holes actually are
A laconic explanation of the phenomenon goes like this.
A black hole is a space-time region whose gravitational attraction is so strong that no object, including light quanta, can leave it.
The black hole was once a massive star. As long as thermonuclear reactions maintain high pressure in its depths, everything remains normal. But over time, the energy supply is depleted and the celestial body, under the influence of its own gravity, begins to shrink. The final stage of this process is the collapse of the stellar core and the formation of a black hole.
- 1. A black hole ejects a jet at high speed
- 2. A disk of matter grows into a black hole
- 3. Black hole
- 4. Detailed diagram of the black hole region
- 5. Size of new observations found
The most common theory is that similar phenomena exist in every galaxy, including the center of our Milky Way. The hole's enormous gravitational force is capable of holding several galaxies around it, preventing them from moving away from each other. The “coverage area” can be different, it all depends on the mass of the star that turned into a black hole, and can be thousands of light years.
Schwarzschild radius
The main property of a black hole is that any substance that falls into it can never return. The same applies to light. At their core, holes are bodies that completely absorb all light falling on them and do not emit any of their own. Such objects may visually appear as clots of absolute darkness.
- 1. Moving matter at half the speed of light
- 2. Photon ring
- 3. Inner photon ring
- 4. Event horizon in a black hole
Based on Einstein's General Theory of Relativity, if a body approaches a critical distance to the center of the hole, it will no longer be able to return. This distance is called the Schwarzschild radius. What exactly happens inside this radius is not known for certain, but there is the most common theory. It is believed that all the matter of a black hole is concentrated in an infinitesimal point, and at its center there is an object with infinite density, which scientists call a singular perturbation.
How does falling into a black hole happen?
(In the picture, the black hole Sagittarius A* looks like an extremely bright cluster of light)
Not so long ago, in 2011, scientists discovered a gas cloud, giving it the simple name G2, which emits unusual light. This glow may be due to friction in the gas and dust caused by the Sagittarius A* black hole, which orbits it as an accretion disk. Thus, we become observers of the amazing phenomenon of absorption of a gas cloud by a supermassive black hole.
According to recent studies, the closest approach to the black hole will occur in March 2014. We can recreate a picture of how this exciting spectacle will take place.
- 1. When first appearing in the data, a gas cloud resembles a huge ball of gas and dust.
- 2. Now, as of June 2013, the cloud is tens of billions of kilometers from the black hole. It falls into it at a speed of 2500 km/s.
- 3. The cloud is expected to pass by the black hole, but tidal forces caused by the difference in gravity acting on the leading and trailing edges of the cloud will cause it to take on an increasingly elongated shape.
- 4. After the cloud is torn apart, most of it will most likely flow into the accretion disk around Sagittarius A*, generating shock waves in it. The temperature will jump to several million degrees.
- 5. Part of the cloud will fall directly into the black hole. No one knows exactly what will happen to this substance next, but it is expected that as it falls it will emit powerful streams of X-rays and will never be seen again.
Video: black hole swallows a gas cloud
(Computer simulation of how much of the G2 gas cloud would be destroyed and consumed by the black hole Sagittarius A*)
What's inside a black hole
There is a theory that states that a black hole is practically empty inside, and all its mass is concentrated in an incredibly small point located at its very center - the singularity.
According to another theory, which has existed for half a century, everything that falls into a black hole passes into another universe located in the black hole itself. Now this theory is not the main one.
And there is a third, most modern and tenacious theory, according to which everything that falls into a black hole dissolves in the vibrations of strings on its surface, which is designated as the event horizon.
So what is an event horizon? It is impossible to look inside a black hole even with a super-powerful telescope, since even light, entering the giant cosmic funnel, has no chance of emerging back. Everything that can be at least somehow considered is located in its immediate vicinity.
The event horizon is a conventional surface line from under which nothing (neither gas, nor dust, nor stars, nor light) can escape. And this is the very mysterious point of no return in the black holes of the Universe.
The material was prepared by the editors of InoSMI specifically for the RIA Science section >>
Michael Finkel
Let's turn the clock back. Before man, before the Earth, before the Sun ignited, before galaxies were born, before light shone, there was a “big bang.” This happened 13.8 billion years ago.
Supernovae seeded space with heavy elements in the early UniverseScientists using Japan's Suzaku X-ray space telescope examined the distribution of iron in the Perseus galaxy cluster, located 250 million light years away.But what happened before that? Many physicists say that “before this” does not exist. They argue that time began to count at the moment of the “big bang”, believing that everything that previously existed is not included in the scope of science. We will never understand what reality was like before the Big Bang, what it was formed from, and why it came to create our Universe. Such ideas are beyond human understanding.
But some unconventional scientists disagree. These physicists theorize that, moments before the “big bang,” the entire mass and energy of the nascent universe was compressed into one incredibly dense, but finite, grain. Let's call it the seed of a new universe.
They believe the seed was unimaginably tiny, perhaps trillions of times smaller than any particle that could be observed by humans. And yet this particle gave rise to all other particles, not to mention galaxies, the solar system, planets and people.
If you really want to call something a particle of God, then this seed is perfect for that name.
So how did this seed come about? One idea was put forward several years ago by Nikodem Poplawski, who works at the University of New Haven. It is that the seed of our Universe was forged in the primordial furnace that the black hole became for it.
Multiplying Multiverses
Before we go any further, it is important to understand that over the past twenty years many theoretical physicists have become convinced that our universe is not the only one. We may be part of a multiverse, representing a vast number of individual universes, each of which is a glowing ball in the true night sky.
There is a lot of controversy about how one universe is connected to another, and whether there is such a connection at all. But all these disputes are purely speculative, and the truth is unprovable. But one attractive idea is that the seed of the universe is like the seed of a plant. This is a piece of essential matter, tightly compressed and hidden inside a protective shell.
This exactly explains what happens inside a black hole. Black holes are the corpses of giant stars. When such a star runs out of fuel, its core collapses. The force of gravity pulls everything together with incredible and ever-increasing force. Temperatures reach 100 billion degrees. Atoms are collapsing. Electrons are torn to pieces. And then this mass shrinks even more.
At this point, the star turns into a black hole. This means that its attractive force is so enormous that even a ray of light cannot escape from it. The boundary between the inside and outside of a black hole is called the event horizon. At the center of almost every galaxy, including our own Milky Way, scientists are discovering colossal black holes, some millions of times more massive than our Sun.
Bottomless questions
If you use Einstein's theory to determine what happens at the bottom of a black hole, you can calculate a point that is infinitely dense and infinitely small. This hypothetical concept is called singularity. But in nature, infinities usually do not exist. The problem lies in Einstein's theories, which provide excellent calculations for much of outer space, but fall apart in the face of incredible forces, such as those inside a black hole, or those present at the birth of the universe.
Physicists like Dr. Poplavsky say that the matter inside a black hole actually gets to a point where it can no longer be squeezed. This "seed" is incredibly tiny and weighs as much as a billion stars. But unlike the singularity, it is quite real.
According to Poplavsky, the compression process stops because black holes rotate. They spin very quickly, possibly reaching the speed of light. And this torsion gives the compressed seed incredible axial rotation. The seed is not only small and heavy; it is also twisted and compressed, like the spring of that devil in the snuff box.
Scientists have measured the magnetic field of the black hole at the center of the Galaxy for the first timeThe supermassive black hole Sgr A* is located at the center of our galaxy. Previously, astronomers discovered the radio pulsar PSR J1745-2900 in the center of our galaxy. They used the radiation emanating from it to measure the strength of the magnetic field at the black hole.In other words, it is quite possible that a black hole is a tunnel, a “one-way door” between two universes, Poplavsky says. This means that if you fall into the black hole at the center of the Milky Way, it is quite possible that you will end up in another universe (well, if not you, then your body crushed into tiny particles). This other universe is not inside ours; the hole is simply a connecting link, like a common root from which two aspen trees grow.
What about all of us, in our own universe? We may be a product of another, older universe. Let's call it our true universe. That seed that the mother universe forged inside the black hole may have made a big bounce 13.8 billion years ago, and although our Universe has been expanding rapidly since then, we may still be beyond the black hole's event horizon.
Abstract on the topic:
"Black Holes of the Universe"
Vladivostok
2000
Content:
Black holes of the universe______________________________3
Hypotheses and paradoxes______________________________6
Conclusion_______________________________________________14
List of used literature_________________15
Black holes of the universe
This phenomenon seemed to contain so much inexplicable, almost mystical, that even Albert Einstein, whose theories, in fact, gave rise to the idea of black holes, simply did not believe in their existence. Today, astrophysicists are increasingly convinced that black holes are a reality.
Mathematical calculations show that there are invisible giants. Four years ago, a group of American and Japanese astronomers pointed their telescope at the constellation Canes Venatici, at the spiral nebula M106 located there. This galaxy is 20 million light years away from us, but can be seen even with an amateur telescope. Many believed that it was the same as thousands of other galaxies. Upon careful study, it turned out that the M106 nebula has one rare feature - in its central part there is a natural quantum generator - a maser. These are gas clouds in which molecules, due to external “pumping,” emit radio waves in the microwave region. The maser helps to accurately determine its location and the speed of the cloud, and ultimately other celestial bodies.
Japanese astronomer Makoto Mionis and his colleagues, while observing the M106 nebula, discovered strange behavior of its cosmic maser. It turned out that the clouds rotate around some center located 0.5 light years away from them. Astronomers were especially intrigued by the peculiarity of this rotation: the peripheral layers of the clouds moved four million kilometers per hour! This suggests that a gigantic mass is concentrated in the center. According to calculations, it is equal to 36 million solar masses.
M106 is not the only galaxy where a black hole is suspected. In the Andromeda nebula, most likely, there is also approximately the same mass - 37 million Suns. It is assumed that in the M87 galaxy - an extremely intense source of radio emission - a black hole has been discovered, in which 2 billion solar masses are concentrated! Rice. 1 Galaxy M87
Only the messenger of radio waves can be a black hole, not yet completely closed by the “capsule” of curved space. Soviet physicist Yakov Zeldovich and his American colleague Edwin Salpeter reported on the model they had developed. The model showed that the black hole attracts gas from the surrounding space, and at first it gathers into a disk near it. As a result of particle collisions, the gas heats up, loses energy and speed, and begins to spiral toward the black hole. Gas heated to several million degrees forms a funnel-shaped vortex. Its particles rush at a speed of 100 thousand kilometers per second. Eventually the vortex of gas reaches the “event horizon” and disappears forever into the black hole.
The maser in the M106 galaxy, which was discussed at the very beginning, is located in a gas disk. Black holes arising in the Universe, judging by what American and Japanese astronomers observed in the spiral nebula M106, have an incomparably greater mass than those described by Oppenheimer’s theory. He considered the case of the collapse of one star, the mass of which is no more than three solar. There is no explanation yet for how such giants are formed that astronomers are already observing.
Recent computer models have shown that a gas cloud at the center of a nascent galaxy could give birth to a huge black hole. But another path of development is also possible: the accumulation of gas first breaks up into many smaller clouds, which will give life to a large number of stars. However, in both cases, part of the cosmic gas, under the influence of its own gravity, will ultimately end its evolution in the form of a black hole.
According to this hypothesis, there is a black hole in almost every galaxy, including ours, somewhere in the center of the Milky Way.
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Observations of so-called double star systems, when only one star is visible through a telescope, give reason to believe that the invisible partner is a black hole. The stars of this pair are located so close to each other that the invisible mass “sucks out” the matter of the visible star and absorbs it. In some cases, it is possible to determine the time of revolution of a star around its invisible partner and the distance to the invisible partner, which makes it possible to calculate the mass hidden from observation.
The first candidate for such a model is a pair discovered in the early 70s. It is located in the constellation Cygnus (indicated by the Cygnus XI index) and emits X-rays. Rotating here is a hot blue star and, in all likelihood, a black hole with a mass equal to 16 solar masses. Another pair (V404) has an invisible mass of 12 Rice. 2 Cygnus XI sunny Another suspected pair is an X-ray source (LMCX3) of nine solar masses located in the Large Magellanic Cloud.
All these cases are well explained in John Michell's discussion of "dark stars". In 1783 he wrote: “If luminous bodies revolve around an invisible something, then we should be able, from the motion of this rotating body, to infer with a certain probability the existence of this central body.”
Hypotheses and paradoxes
General relativity famously predicted that mass bends space. And just four years after the publication of Einstein’s work, this effect was discovered by astronomers. During a total solar eclipse, observing with a telescope, astronomers saw stars that were actually obscured by the edge of the black lunar disk that covered the Sun. Under the influence of solar gravity, the images of stars have shifted. (The accuracy of the measurement is also amazing here, because they shifted by less than one thousandth of a degree!)
Astronomers now know for sure that under the influence of the “lens of gravity”, which is represented by heavy stars and, above all, black holes, the real positions of many celestial bodies actually differ from those that we see from Earth. Distant galaxies may appear shapeless and “capsule-shaped” to us. This means: gravity is so strong and space is so twisted that light travels in a circle. Truly there you can see what is happening around the corner.
Let's imagine something completely incredible: a certain brave astronaut decided to send his ship to a black hole in order to learn its secrets. What will he see on this fantastic journey?
As the clock approaches the target, the clock on the spacecraft will fall further and further behind - this follows from the theory of relativity. On approaching the target, our traveler will find himself in a pipe, as if in a ring surrounding a black hole, but it will seem to him that he is flying through a completely straight tunnel, and not at all in a circle. But an even more amazing phenomenon awaits the astronaut: once he gets beyond the “event horizon” and moves along the pipe, he will see his back, the back of his head...
The general theory of relativity says that the concepts “outside” and “inside” do not have an objective meaning; they are relative, just like the indications “left” or “right”, “up” or “down”. All this paradoxical confusion with directions fits very poorly with our everyday assessments.
Once the ship crosses the border of the black hole, people on Earth will no longer be able to see anything of what will happen there. And the clock on the ship will stop, all the colors will be mixed towards red: the light will lose some of its energy in the fight against gravity. All objects will take on strange, distorted shapes. And finally, even if this black hole were only twice as heavy as our Sun, the gravity would be so strong that both the ship and its hypothetical captain would be pulled into a string and soon torn apart. Matter trapped inside a black hole will not be able to resist the forces pulling it toward the center. It is likely that matter will disintegrate and enter a singular state. According to some ideas, this decayed matter will become part of some other Universe - black holes connect our space with other worlds.
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Like all bodies in nature, stars do not remain unchanged, they are born, evolve, and finally “die.” To trace the life path of stars and understand how they age, you need to know how they arise. In the past this seemed like a big mystery; modern astronomers can already describe with great confidence the paths leading to the appearance of bright stars in our night sky.
Not long ago, astronomers believed that it took millions of years to form a star from interstellar gas and dust. But in recent years, stunning photographs have been taken of a region of the sky that is part of the Great Orion Nebula, where a small cluster of stars has appeared over the course of several years. On Fig.3 Great Orion Nebula photographs from 1947 a group of three star-like objects was visible at this location. By 1954 some of them became oblong, and by 1959. these elongated formations broke up into individual stars - for the first time in the history of mankind, people observed the birth of stars literally before our eyes; this unprecedented event showed astronomers that stars can be born in a short interval of time, and previously seemed strange reasoning that stars usually arise in groups, or star clusters turned out to be true.
American scientists have proposed an absolutely incredible hypothesis that our entire vast Universe is located inside a giant Black Hole. Surprisingly, such a model can explain many of the mysteries of the Universe.
American physicist from Indiana University Nikodem Poplavsky is the founder of a rather unusual theory of the structure of our Universe.
According to this theory, our entire Universe is located inside a giant Black Hole, which in turn is located in the super-great-Universe.
This seemingly unusual hypothesis can explain many of the inconsistencies that exist in the modern theory of the Universe. Poplavsky presented his theory a year ago, and now he has clarified it and significantly expanded it.
Black hole - entrance to the tunnel of space-time
In the model of the construction of the Universe developed by the American physicist, the assumption that Black holes
are entrances to Einstein-Rosen wormholes, that is, spatial tunnels that connect different parts of four-dimensional space-time.
In this model, the Black Hole is connected by a tunnel to its own antipode - the White Hole, which is located at the other end of the time tunnel. It is inside the wormhole with this structure of the Universe that a constant expansion of space is observed.
Now Poplavsky concluded that our Universe is the inside of this tunnel connecting the Black and White holes. This model of the universe explains most of the insoluble problems of modern cosmology: dark matter, dark energy, quantum effects when analyzing gravity on a cosmic scale.
To build his model, the author of the theory used a special mathematical apparatus - the theory of torsion. In it, space-time appears as a single beam, which twists under the influence of gravitational curvature of space-time. These curvatures can be detected even by our very imperfect observational means on a global scale.
What is the world really like?
Therefore, in our surrounding world, everyone sees only what is accessible to their senses, for example, a bug crawling on a balloon feels it flat and infinite. Therefore, it is very difficult to detect the twisting of flexible space-time, especially if you are inside this dimension.
Of course, such a model of the structure of the Universe assumes that each Black Hole in our Universe is a gateway to another Universe. But it is not at all clear how many “layers”, as Poplavsky calls them, exist in the great-great-N times-great-Universe, in which our Black Hole with our Universe is located.
Is it really possible to confirm such an incredible hypothesis? Nikodem Poplavsky believes that this is possible. After all, in our Universe, all Black holes and stars rotate. According to logical reasoning, it should be exactly the same in the super-great-Universe. This means that the rotation parameters of our Universe should be the same as those of the Black Hole in which it is located.
In this case, part of the spiral Galaxies should twist to the left, and the other spatially opposite part should twist to the right. And indeed, according to modern observational data, most of the spiral Galaxies are twisted to the left - “left-handed”, and in the other, opposite part of the observable Universe, the opposite is true - most of the spiral Galaxies are twisted to the right.
A black hole in physics is defined as a region in space-time whose gravitational attraction is so strong that even objects moving at the speed of light, including quanta of light itself, cannot leave it. The boundary of this area is called the event horizon, and its characteristic size is the gravitational radius, which is called the Black Forest radius. Black holes are the most mysterious objects in the Universe. They owe their unfortunate name to the American astrophysicist John Wheeler. It was he who, in the popular lecture “Our Universe: Known and Unknown” in 1967, called these superdense bodies holes. Previously, such objects were called “collapsed stars” or “collapsers.” But the term “black hole” has taken root, and it has become simply impossible to change it. There are two types of black holes in the Universe: 1 – supermassive black holes, the mass of which is millions of times greater than the mass of the Sun (such objects are believed to be located in the centers of galaxies); 2 – less massive black holes that arise as a result of the compression of giant dying stars, their mass is more than three solar masses; As the star contracts, the matter becomes increasingly denser and, as a result, the object's gravity increases to such an extent that light cannot overcome it. Neither radiation nor matter can escape a black hole. Black holes are super-powerful gravitators.
The radius to which a star must shrink to become a black hole is called the gravitational radius. For black holes formed from stars, it is only a few tens of kilometers. In some pairs of double stars, one of them is invisible in the most powerful telescope, but the mass of the invisible component in such a gravitational system turns out to be extremely large. Most likely, such objects are either neutron stars or black holes. Sometimes the invisible components in such pairs strip material from a normal star. In this case, the gas is separated from the outer layers of the visible star and falls into an unknown place - into an invisible black hole. But before falling onto the hole, the gas emits electromagnetic waves of very different lengths, including very short X-ray waves. Moreover, near a neutron star or black hole, the gas becomes very hot and becomes a source of powerful, high-energy electromagnetic radiation in the X-ray and gamma-ray ranges. Such radiation does not pass through the earth's atmosphere, but can be observed using space telescopes. One of the likely candidates for black holes is a powerful source of X-rays in the constellation Cygnus.