What would happen, you might wonder, if we took a spacecraft near a black hole’s event horizon? The answer-spaghettification! That’s the technical term, at least.Īs our spacecraft approaches it, the gravity will be so much stronger on the side closer to the black hole than at the other side that it will get completely stretched out like a piece of spaghetti. An event horizon is probably what you are thinking of when you think of a black hole. This circle is known as the event horizon. The gravity on the inside of the circle is so strong that nothing can escape-it sucks in everything, even light. Imagine a circle with a singularity in the middle. It may be infinitely small, but its influence is enormous. The point where all that mass is trapped is called a singularity. All of that material left over from the explosion, many times the mass of our Sun, falls into an infinitely small point.īlack holes can form in many ways though, and large black holes can have tens to millions of times the mass of our sun trapped in a point smaller than the tip of a pin! Some black holes trap more and more material as their mass increases. The energy that held the star together disappears and it collapses in on itself producing a magnificent explosion. Nothing is darker than a black hole.Ī black hole is an area of such immense gravity that nothing-not even light-can escape from it.īlack holes form at the end of some stars’ lives. Even so, some areas are darker than others. 16 hours ago &0183 &32 A team of theoretical physicists have discovered a strange structure in space-time that to an outside observer would look exactly like a black hole, but upon closer inspection would be. If the researchers can discover an important observational difference between topological solitons and traditional black holes, this might pave the way to finding a way to test string theory itself.Space is a pretty dark place. However, these exotic objects serve as important test studies. These topological solitons are incredibly hypothetical objects, based on our understanding of string theory, which has not yet been proven to be a viable update to our understanding of physics. So you could in principle go up to a soliton and hold it in your hand, assuming you survived the encounter. Topological solitons, since they are not singularities, do not feature event horizons. One of the key features of a black hole is its event horizon, an imaginary surface that if you were to cross it you would find yourself unable to escape. It's only once you got close would you realize that you are not looking at a black hole. Images derived from the Event Horizon Telescope and detected gravitational wave signatures would all behave the same. They would have shadows, rings of light, the works. To a distant observer, these solitons would appear exactly as we predict black holes to appear. Because they are objects of extreme space-time, they bend space and time around them, which affects the path of light. The researchers studied these solitons by examining the behavior of light that would pass near them. The research is published in the journal Physical Review D. They require no matter or other forces to exist-they are as natural to the fabric of space-time as cracks in ice. In their analysis they found that these topological solitons are stable defects in space-time itself. That exotic structure in spacetime gave a team of researchers the tools they needed to identify a new class of object, something that they call a topological soliton. Instead, there have to be extra spatial dimensions that are curled up on themselves into manifolds so small that they escape everyday notice and experimentation. In order to support the wide variety of particles and forces that we observe in the universe, these strings can't just vibrate in our three spatial dimensions. In string theory all the particles of the universe are actually microscopic vibrating loops of string. But after nearly a century of searching for extensions, we have not yet confirmed a better theory of gravity.īut we do have candidates, including string theory. Space: The final frontier, or the next venture capital gold rush The astronomer team believes this rare event has lasted so long because the supermassive black hole at the heart of it has been feeding on matter from a gigantic gas cloud, possibly thousands of times more massive than the Sun. Since we know that infinite densities cannot actually happen in the universe, we take this as a sign that Einstein's theory is incomplete. But that same theory predicts that their centers are singularities, which are points of infinite density. Einstein's general theory of relativity predicts the existence of black holes, formed when giant stars collapse.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |