Did Scientists Create A Black Hole? | WHAT HAPPENED?

 

Encounters with black holes are the cosmic equivalent of a swimmer bumping into a great white shark or a backpacker stumbling across a female grizzly bear with cubs nearby these monsters can rip apart unlucky stars and scatter their remnants as easily as the massive shark devours its prey still humans and other creatures do live to tell the tale after many of these dangerous liaisons so is it possible for stars to survive a close encounter with the celestial beasts what if our own son were threatened with destruction from an extreme wanderer astronomers like their hands have not been full in recent months found time recently to pit diverse and highly detailed virtual stars against simulated black holes and the results stretch the imagination welcome to Science Reads in today's article we dig deeper

 into the alphas of the universe

 commonly known as black holes and reveal how their very real encounters with stars are likely to end the greatest cosmic boogie man is the black hole a place in space so dense with a gravitational pull so strong that even light cannot escape it is important to understand that black holes were born of theory not observation in 1915 as the first world war was raging theoretical physicist Albert Einstein completed 10 long years of work expanding his special theory of relativity late in November the field equations of gravitation was published and he sent a copy to a colleague who was trying to stay warm and alive in a battlefield trench on the Russian front the recipient was Carl Schwartzchild a 42 year old accomplished theorist and mathematician who had joined the war effort in just days Schwartz's child wrote back with the first written solution of how space-time as Einstein theorized it is warped by the intense gravity of a theoretical megadense object the black hole for years the black hole was little more than a mathematical curiosity and even the name black hole was not applied until 1967 in 1971 the development of x-ray astronomy led to the first physical black hole being discovered without the benefit of light escaping astronomers relied on finding them through their effects on space and objects around them then came 2019 catching even a glimpse of an entity that does not allow light to escape its clutches is to put it mildly a challenge and while

 astronomers have long seen evidence of

 their existence it was only in 2019 that the first silhouette of an actual black hole was captured it took well over a decade of work a team of international astronomers reimagined an existing radio astronomy technique to produce a high resolution image of the mysterious structure specifically by capturing the glowing gas that surrounds the black holes event horizon that's the point of no return or more

 specifically the theoretical boundary

 around a black hole beyond which no

 light or other radiation can escape

 a place you should avoid using a vast array of telescopes from the south pole to Spain along with imaging from several nasa spacecraft astronomers focused on m87 the supermassive black hole at the center of the massive messier 87 galaxy 55 million light years from earth a team member described it as akin to capturing an image of an orange on the surface of the moon when the observations were completed

 astronomers did not have an image but rather a mountain of data and that's not a metaphor as Dan Maron associate professor of astronomy at the University of Arizona described it we had five petabytes of data recorded it amounts to more than half a ton of hard drives transmitting that much data over the internet even with the fastest speeds on earth was not even remotely feasible so researchers got it to western Massachusetts and bonn Germany the old-fashioned way on airplanes what astronomers got for their efforts was the first photograph of this mysterious and exotic monster at least of its immediate surroundings and the beautiful effect it has on them that was thought to be unseeable and it gets better researchers noted a significant amount of polarized light around the black hole so the international team went back to work focusing on the light affected by the magnetized and hot areas around the black hole astronomers early in 2021 revealed an even more startling image of m87 in it the object's accretion disk of hot gas and other diffuse materials are clearly swirling around the black hole perhaps even more fascinating are the bright jets of energy and matter that somehow escape before capture and are blown at least 5 000 light years from m87 center most nearby matter is doomed to fall into the black hole but astronomers are trying to determine how these jets make their getaway now let's delve into how astronomers created a cosmic game of pinball to learn more about unfortunate meetings between stars and black holes since thankfully we have no first hand

 experience with stars encountering black holes an ambitious team of astronomers at the max Planck institute for astrophysics in Germany did the next best thing a stunning simulation the team led by theoretical astrophysicist Tejo Ryu became the first to combine the physical effects of Einstein's general theory of relativity with realistic stellar density models eight stars ranging from one tenth to ten times the density of our sun are sent to the cosmic neighborhood of a huge black hole with a density one million times greater than the sun astronomers sent the hapless stars on a u-shaped trajectory that brought them as close as 24 million miles away from the black hole closer than mercury is to the sun their interaction with the black hole's gravity varied but for some the results were cataclysmic four of the crash test dummy stars were ripped apart by the overwhelming gravity of the black hole in a process called a tidal disruption event a rather innocuous description for having the matter of an object shredded and swept into the monster's accretion disk of matter swirling around its horizon and that's the pleasant part after which the black hole consumes the remnants completely however some stars in the simulation were only partially disrupted and through their own gravity were able to basically reassemble as they moved away from the black hole how and why did this happen first of all when it's you against the

 black hole you should bet on the black hole however astronomers now believe that there are factors that determine whether a star is completely destroyed by a close encounter with these cosmic monsters in the simulation four stars survived the close approach and size had little to nothing to do with their survival the star most like the sun made it through along with those that had 0.15 0.3 and 0.7 solar masses the stars that were 0.4 0.5 3 and 10 times the mass of the sun were shredded and gone it seems intuitive that the larger stars have more matter to lose and thus have better chances of escaping being devoured by the black hole but the results showed otherwise turns out the key factor for living another day was density all four of the survivors of their encounters were the higher density stars that managed to keep more of their matter intact and as we mentioned the star modeled after our sun also survived which is good news considering that the closest black hole to you and i is sagittarius a the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way it resides roughly 26,000 light years away which is just around the corner cosmically speaking the team of astronomers wildly succeeded in getting a better understanding of how tidal disruptions occur and their effects on stars that unwittingly find themselves too close to black holes when we think of black holes much in the way we consider great white sharks and angry mother grizzlies we tend to only consider their destructive influences on their neighbors but astronomers have found a whole new side of these mysterious and perhaps misunderstood entities in fact researchers say that the act of heating and ejecting a galaxy's gas which makes it more difficult for the larger galaxies to produce new stars has the exact opposite effect on satellite galaxies in a study published in the peer review journal nature in June 2021 astronomers revealed data from over 124,000 satellite galaxies on the outskirts of nearly 30,000 large galaxies that's been collected for over two decades each of the large galaxies is believed to have a supermassive black hole in its core the energy of these giant black holes blows gases and jets far away from the galaxy itself where the now intergalactic gas forms bubbles in galaxy clusters small satellite

 galaxies pass through these bubbles

 and astronomers have observed a very interesting phenomenon a baby boom of new stars see these satellite galaxies travel through intergalactic gases surrounding the much larger central galaxy and in the encounters have their own gases swept away astronomers call this ram pressure stripping and its ultimate effect is to leave these satellite galaxies void of star-making materials and thus barren but those jets of gases blown outwards by black holes effectively clear away gases that cause the satellite galaxies to have their star-making material swept away what's left behind is a void an area clear of gases that allow these smaller galaxies to continue to reproduce astronomers found these galaxies are up to five percent less likely to have had their star formation quenched perhaps the finest defense of misunderstood black holes was tweeted by Christa Smith a NASA earth and space sciences fellow at Goddard space flight center smith urged cosmic critics to stop demonizing supermassive black holes they aren't lurking in galactic centers that's their home they built it keep a respectful distance and you'll be fine they are just beautiful giants maybe but after seeing the breathtaking encounters between stars and black holes as simulated the advice about keeping a respectful distance is easy to understand so what do you think about these dynamic close encounters between black holes and relatives of our sun are 26,000 light years between earth and our galactic core a bit too close for comfort tell us in the comments