Researchers from Caltech University have reported that they have observed a collision between two black holes which has resulted in their merger, as another supermassive black hole helped illuminate these chain of events. The findings have been published in Physical Review Letters Journal and if confirmed, would be the first optical observations ever of a merger.
Crux of the Matter
What Is A Black Hole And How Is It Formed? It is a region in space where the gravitational pull is so high, that all light is pulled out into the middle. Since no light can escape, people can’t see black holes.
The crescent shape arises from the black hole’s rotation, this is the first picture ever released of a black hole. Credits to Katie Bouman’s algorithm and Event Horizon Telescope
Ironically, the black hole is much more than being an empty space or a ‘hole’. The amount of matter packed in this small area is analogous to a star of 10X size than the Sun, squished into a sphere that is approximately the diameter of a whole city.
Big black holes are made when the center of a huge star collapses and the exploding star that blasts part of the star into space creates the supernova phenomenon.
Supernova remnants, after a giant star ended its life, as captured by Hubble Telescope, Source: NASA
But If They Are Black, How Can We Detect Them? Even though they can’t be seen but the researcher can observe how strong gravity affects the stars and gas around the black hole. Thus such areas are studied to find out if stars are flying around or orbiting a black hole.
Antennas of the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile give a detailed imaging of astro-events, Source: ESO
High energy light is made when a black hole and a star are close together that can’t be seen with the naked eye. Scientists then use special space satellites and telescopes to detect this phenomenon.
So Did Two Black Holes Merge Recently? First observed in 2019, S190521g merger occurred 4 billion light-years away, within the area of a supermassive black hole called J1249+3449 (100 million times bigger than the Sun).
The two smaller black holes involved in the merger were each 150 times more big than the sun. They encountered the supermassive’s accretion disk, which is a swirl of stars, gas, and dust that is slowly sucked inside.
The effects of this black hole merger could be felt across the universe. pic.twitter.com/mwk4KUEAKh — IGN (@IGN) July 5, 2020
So when the two collided, the force sent the merged object hurtling out of the accretion disk at a speed of 700,000 kmph. This lit up the surrounding gas in the disk, producing light that was trillion times brighter than the sun. How Were These Events Detected? The black hole merger produced ripples in space that were detected on Earth by LIGO, a gravitational wave observatory. 34 days later, the Zwicky Transient Facility, California spotted light produced by the merger event.
LIGO-India or IndIGO, A planned advanced gravitational-wave observatory to be located in India
What Does This Imply? The Event Horizon Telescope had managed to snap the supermassive black hole last year, making it the first picture captured of any black hole.
Here is what will happen if you fell into a Black Hole! pic.twitter.com/D24PaurjAu — TheSpaceAcademy.org✨🔭 (@ThespaceAcad) July 12, 2020
Now we know that the image is not of the black hole itself, but rather the glowing gas and dust bordering its event horizon, which is its spherical outer boundary. In times ahead, scientists can understand how matter interacts with these objects, and whether a merger can be predicted before it happens.
Einstein And Hawking Would Be Happy Now? Yes, the top most prediction of Theory of General Relativity, given by the physics genius, Albert Einstein, is the existence of black holes. Stephen Hawking, the famed cosmologist, and physicist was the one who continuously shed light on black holes and gave more solid mathematical backing to the equations stated by Einstein.
Legends in Physics – Stephen Hawking and Albert Einstein, Source: Indiatimes
According to the theory of relativity, gravity results from how mass distorts space and time. The greater is an object’s mass, the stronger is its gravitational pull. First confirmed in 1919 by Sir Arthur Eddington, who measured the bending of starlight around the sun during a total solar eclipse, this is the second instance of confirmation.
Curiopedia
Death by Black Hole: And Other Cosmic Quandaries is a 2007 popular science book written by Neil deGrasse Tyson. It is an anthology of several of Tyson’s most popular articles, all published in Natural History magazine between 1995 and 2005.
Micro black holes, also called quantum mechanical black holes or mini black holes, are hypothetical tiny black holes, for which quantum mechanical effects play an important role. The concept that black holes may exist that are smaller than stellar mass was introduced in 1971 by Stephen Hawking.
The Penrose process is theorised by Roger Penrose as a means whereby energy can be extracted from a rotating black hole. Roger Penrose is an English mathematical physicist, mathematician and philosopher of science. Penrose has received several prizes and awards, including the 1988 Wolf Prize for physics, which he shared with Stephen Hawking for the Penrose–Hawking singularity theorems.
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