Why, then, did the material observed in galaxy PG211+143 fall directly into a black hole? The astronomers said the high velocity could have been the result of misaligned disks of material rotating around the black hole: Instead it orbits the hole, approaching gradually through an accretion disk – a sequence of circular orbits of decreasing size. … black holes are so compact that gas is almost always rotating too much to fall in directly. Most infall to black holes doesn’t move so fast, because, before it enters the hole, the material forms an accretion disk. The gas has almost no rotation around the hole, and is detected extremely close to it in astronomical terms, at a distance of only 20 times the hole’s size (its event horizon, the boundary of the region where escape is no longer possible). The researchers found the spectra to be strongly red-shifted, showing the observed matter to be falling into the black hole at the enormous speed of 30 per cent of the speed of light, or around 100,000 kilometers per second. This object was already known as one likely to have a supermassive black hole at its core (as most galaxies now are thought to do). The researchers used XMM-Newton data to examine at X-ray spectra (where X-rays are dispersed by wavelength) of the galaxy PG211+143. The XMM-Newton spacecraft, via ESA/ University of Leicester/ RAS. The velocity of light is 186,000 miles (300,000 km) per second.Ĭool, yes? These results appeared in a paper published Septemin the peer-reviewed journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. We were able to follow an Earth-sized clump of matter for about a day, as it was pulled towards the black hole, accelerating to a third of the velocity of light before being swallowed up by the hole.
Ken Pounds of the University of Leicester, who led the team that made the discovery, said: The black hole is a supermassive one, located at the heart of a galaxy known as PG1211+143, about a billion light-years away. The team used data from the European Space Agency’s X-ray observatory XMM-Newton to make the discovery. Recent computer simulations suggest a mechanism – via misaligned disks around the hole – by which gas can fall directly in at high speed. This is much faster than what’s been observed in the past, but it isn’t unexpected. An earlier version said the KTH Royal Institute of Technology was hosting the conference.We’ve known for decades that black holes exist, and that matter sometimes falls into them, and now we have the first published evidence – from a team of UK astronomers – of matter falling into a black hole at 30 percent of the speed of light. This article was amended on 27 August 2015. Hawking is director of research at Cambridge University’s department of applied mathematics and theoretical physics. Things can get out of a black hole both on the outside and possibly come out in another universe.” They are not the eternal prisons they were once thought. “The message of this lecture is that black holes ain’t as black as they are painted. So although I’m keen on space flight, I’m not going to try that. But you couldn’t come back to our universe. The hole would need to be large and if it was rotating it might have a passage to another universe. In his lecture, reported in a blog from the KTH Royal Institute of Technology, he said: “The existence of alternative histories with black holes suggests this might be possible. Either it is translated into a kind of “hologram” on the edge of the black hole, or it breaks out into an alternative universe. Even information falling into a black hole ought to end up somewhere.Īccording to Hawking, it does – in one of two ways. But according to the way the universe works, this should be impossible. Information about the physical state of something disappearing into a black hole appears to be completely lost.
He was speaking at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology, where the Nordic Institute for Theoretical Physics (Nordita) is hosting the Hawking Radiation Conference dedicated to examining the mystery of the “information paradox” – a conundrum concerning what happens to things swallowed by black holes. There’s a way out.” He said he had discovered a mechanism “by which information is returned out of the black hole”. In a public lecture in Stockholm, Sweden, Prof Hawking said: “If you feel you are in a black hole, don’t give up.
0 kommentar(er)
