A Black Hole That Broke the Science (Black Hole) - Jerry Tech

A Black Hole That Broke the Science Black Hole 

This year, on April 10th, scientists werefinally able to do the unthinkable: they allowed humanity to look straight into the abyss ofa super-massive black hole and take a photo like a tourist attraction! But even after these accomplishments, we stilldon’t know much about black holes at all, since one of them has challenged the wholescientific community with new impossible feats. In the middle of July 2019, black holes puzzledastronomers once again. New observations were made possible, thanksto the famed Hubble telescope, by a team of European scientists.

Their study showed that a relatively smallblack hole, situated at the core of NGC 3147, contradicts all our expectations by almostcompletely mimicking its much bigger siblings. To show you how exceptional this discoveryis, I’ll have to start with the most basic question. What is a black hole? It’s the tiniest and heaviest object possiblein the universe. It can swallow entire stars with ease andis absolutely invisible to the human eye. But wait a minute! What was that giant, visible, orange thingin the pictures then? Did scientists deceive us with another computersimulation? No. Not at all. The photos are as real as it gets. Except the image in the photos is not of aBlack Hole itself. I shall explain. Every black hole was once a shining star,just like the others you see in the night sky

At the end of its life, a star can collapseonto itself and condense all of its enormous mass into a tiny dot of space. Such an incredibly dense object will producea gravitational force that’ll practically tear a hole in time-space itself and bendthe sole matter of reality around it. From the moment of collapse, this monstrousgravity will attract, and eagerly consume, every piece of matter around it. Even the lightest and fastest particles inthe universe, like photons, of which light consists, wouldn’t be able to escape thisunstoppable force. The core, and center of mass, of this blackhole is called a singularity. This is the single cause of all the madnessthat’s going on around it. The mass of this thing can be from hundredsof millions of the Sun’s mass, to hundreds of billions! And it takes so little space in volume, thatits density is almost infinite. No wonder this thing seemingly breaks allthe laws of physics! In fact, the density is the most excitingthing about black holes

You see, it turns out that any object canbecome a tiny black hole if compressed enough. For example, our planet would have to shrinkto a third of an inch to become a tiny singularity of its own kind, and start to bend realityaround itself. Of course, this can’t happen, but it happensto exhausted stars. The surrounding space near the singularityis the notorious event horizon. This is exactly why black holes are calledblack, though it’s not entirely true. Normally, you can tell that something is blackbecause this color doesn’t reflect light at any of its wavelengths. The event horizon of black holes is blackbecause none of the light that gets into them can escape. So, black holes aren’t really black, they’rejust invisible – they’re more than a tangible manifestation of nothingness for any light-sensitivedevice. The only one of its kind in the whole universe. The thing that makes the black hole visible,and is depicted in the recently released photos, lies beyond the event horizon

It’s called the accretion disk. It’s a brightly illuminated disk of matter,swirling towards the center of a black hole like when a giant drain forms a quasar. Quasars have their place among the oldestcelestial bodies known to humanity, because their immense brightness can outshine evena whole bunch of stars put together. This brightness is achievable because allthe mass that surrounds a black hole is rotating around it at a tenth of the speed of light. A movement this fast leads to constant outburstsof radiation, and some of it shows itself in the visible spectrum as light and heat. Accretion disks consist mostly of superheatedgas and space dust, and the speed of their movement increases the closer they get tothe event horizon. The biggest and shiniest accretion disks areconsidered to have supermassive black holes situated in the cores of the biggest and brightestgalaxies. And it’s easy to guess why. The more matter a black hole must feast upon,the bigger its mass. Its event horizon also gets bigger, and anaccretion disk forms around it. This is exactly the reason why the NGC 3147’sblack hole is so unique. It isn’t supposed to have one, but it does. Let’s compare some galaxies and black holesin their centers to further elaborate on this glaring difference

The brightest example would be the black holein the middle of the largest galaxy known to us in existence, and the brightest galaxyof its cluster. This galaxy is so large that it would be hardto imagine it using just numbers. If this colossus was to replace our own galaxy,it would not only take the place of the Milky Way, but also of several neighboring galaxiesaltogether. This giant is the IC 1101 galaxy. When it was first discovered, it was takenfor a huge orange nebula – an aftermath of the supernova explosion. It took several years to get to the shockingtruth – the orange color we see is the light of about 100 trillion stars collected in oneelliptical galaxy. Most of them looked like ancient red dwarfstars, giving away their tired yellow and orange light. But the biggest surprise was hiding in themiddle of it. The supermassive black hole at the core ofIC 1101 suits its huge galaxy well. This terrifying monster is heavier than about40 billion masses of the Sun. The accretion disk is as huge and luminousas can be expected

It’s much like this same black hole fromthe photos. Only black holes this huge are sometimes calledultra-massive, giving us a rare chance to visibly detect them. Let’s move closer to our home for a minute. Our galaxy is much, much smaller than IC 1101,and not as luminous. The Milky Way is just 100,000 light-yearsacross – sounds like nothing when compared to the supposed 6 million light-years of IC1101’s diameter. But our galaxy is still rich enough to feedits black holes properly. The most notable black hole in the Milky Wayis in the Sagittarius constellation, right in the middle of the spiral of stars thatour galaxy’s basically made of. We’re 26,000 light-years from it, and it’smore than 4 billion times heavier than the Sun, which makes it a supermassive black hole. Although Sagittarius’s black hole is shroudedby gas clouds, blocking our view, scientists were able to get an image based on the radiospectrum eradiation coming from its accretion disk. And then we have spiral galaxy NGC 3147, 130million light-years away from us

This galaxy is small, and not dense enoughto constantly feed something as big and powerful as a supermassive black hole. Black holes in these galaxies are often calledstarving black holes for a reason. It’s expected that black holes, in a positionthis unfortunate, can’t have furious swirling accretion disks around them. It’s far more probable that it would havesome concentrated gas around it, in a shape more akin to a donut, and nowhere near asluminous. Still, against all odds, NGC 3147 has thesame kind of accretion disk as its bigger siblings. According to our knowledge, this is almostimpossible; and this galaxy was selected precisely to find a black hole with no accretion disk. But as they say, there’s no negative resultin scientific research. Sometimes unexpected findings can teach usa lot more than pure success. For now, no one knows how this starving blackhole can support this disk. To uncover the secret, Hubble stays busy searchingfor other galaxies with a lesser luminosity to find new black holes and see if they showsimilar abrupt qualities

It’ll not only allow astronomers to studythe accretion disks of starving black holes, but will also present a unique opportunityto test Albert Einstein’s theories of relativity. The disk of NGC 3147’s black hole is placedso close to the event horizon that the light it’s emitting is twisting like nowhere else. This is exactly what scientists had been lookingfor. There’s no better place to delve into thefabric of laws, ruling the relations between time and space, than a reality-bending blackhole with such rare properties. How about you? What secrets do you think black holes canshow us in the future? Wormholes? Another reality? Let me know down in the comments! If you learned something new today, then givethis video a like and share it with a friend. But – hey! – don’t go getting suckedinto a black hole just yet! We have over 2,000 cool videos for you tocheck out. Right here! All you have to do is pick the left or rightvideo, click on it, and enjoy! Stay on the Bright Side of life!