- 3436 - BLACKHOLES - new discoveries to study? In 2021 there were many exciting new results regarding strange gravitational beasts we call “blackholes:. In February physicists revised their estimates of the properties of the cosmic monster sitting in the heart of the Cygnus X-1 system, which also happens to be the first blackhole ever confirmed to exist.
------------- 3436 - BLACKHOLES - new discoveries to study?
- Discovered nearly 60 years ago, the “Cygnus X-1” blackhole was found to be 50% more massive than previously thought, making it 21 times the sun's mass, and spinning very close to the speed of light, setting a new record for blackhole rotation.
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- The blackhole Cygnus X-1 is located about 7,200 light-years away and is slowly consuming a blue supergiant companion star. When a star wanders too close to the edge of a blackhole, gravitational forces will pull it apart into long strands that get sucked down the blackhole's center.
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- This process, known as "spaghettification," produces light as the stellar material heats up via friction, allowing astronomers to see it.
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- In May, 2021, researchers for the first time spotted another star being shredded and devoured in this way by this blackhole weighing an astounding 30 million times the mass of the sun and located in the center of a galaxy 750 million light-years from Earth.
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- In June, 2021, researchers with the “Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory” (LIGO) watched two gigantic blackholes merge into a single entity and analyzed the ripples in the fabric of space-time called ‘“gravitational waves” created as the blackholes spiraled toward each other at high speed.
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- The resulting blackhole's surface area was larger than the first two combined. In addition to providing amazing data, the findings help prove a 1971 conjecture from British astrophysicist Stephen Hawking known as the “blackhole area theorem“.
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- The Hawking theorem states that it is impossible for the surface area of a blackhole to decrease over time, a law Hawking derived using both Einstein's theory of general relativity as well as his understanding of entropy.
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- According to quantum mechanics, blackholes should be able to shrink and evaporate, and so it's unclear how to square that with Hawking's law that their surface area must also always increase.
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- LIGO had many of blackhole findings to deliver in June, 2021, when researchers working with the facility announced that, for the first time, they were confident that they'd seen blackholes merging with compact entities called neutron stars.
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- Along with blackholes, neutron stars are one potential end result of a massive star's death, when the star explodes as a supernova and leaves behind a remnant. While LIGO had previously seen hints of potential blackhole-neutron star mergers, it wasn't until, 2020, that two signals conclusively proved such mergers were happening.
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- Both detections occurred in January, 2020, roughly 10 days apart. The first involved a blackhole with about six times the sun's mass devouring a neutron star one and a half times the sun's mass, while the second involved a blackhole about nine times the mass of the sun and a neutron star about twice as massive as the sun.
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- Almost every known galaxy has a supermassive blackhole in its center, suggesting that there is a tight relationship between the two. But scientists still don't understand how a blackhole affects its galactic host.
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- Research released in June, 2020, showed high-speed winds being blown from a 13 billion-year-old galaxy, one nearly as old as the universe itself. This is the earliest detected example of “galactic wind“, which is burped out of supermassive blackholes as they consume surrounding gas and dust.
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- The powerful winds were traveling at 1.1 million mph. They were moving fast enough to propel material all over the galaxy and likely hinder star formation.
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- In July, 2021, astronomers captured X-rays flaring from a supermassive blackhole in the center of a spiral galaxy called Zwicky, which is 1.8 billion light-years away. The researchers not only detected light coming from the front of the blackhole, but they also managed to find strange echoes of light that they initially couldn't place.
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- These turned out to originate from the “back of the blackhole“, meaning that the mammoth entity was warping the fabric of space-time so much that light was being pulled from one side of the blackhole to the other. This process is exactly what would be expected from Einstein's theory of general relativity but, until now, hadn't been definitively detected.
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- 12 enormous invisible black holes could be lurking on the outskirts of the Milky Way. The results from a new simulation of galaxy collisions show that gravitational forces could cause supermassive blackholes, weighing millions or billions of times that of the sun, to go flying and wander the inky depths of the universe.
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- In December, 2021, telescopes captured evidence of the closest blackhole pair to our own planet, a duo spinning around one another some 89 million light-years away from Earth in the constellation Aquarius.
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- The previous record-holding blackhole pair is located five times farther away than this one, meaning scientists have the opportunity to study such systems in greater detail than before.
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- Both members of the duo are heavyweights, the larger has a mass of almost 154 million suns, while the smaller is 6.3 million times more massive than our star. They orbit one another with a separation of 1,600 light-years indicating that they will merge into one giant blackhole 250 million years from now.
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- A tiny galaxy orbiting our own at a distance of about 820,000 light-years appears to contain an oddity. The “Leo I” dwarf galaxy, which is 50 times smaller than the Milky Way, hosts an outsized blackhole, one with almost the same mass as the blackhole in the Milky Way's center.
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- Astronomers are baffled as to how such a large blackhole came to reside in such a small galaxy. Figuring out precisely what this means for both blackhole and galactic evolution will have to wait for the coming years.
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- Astronomers study stars that shine. Now we are studying blackholes that take away that light. We need new instruments to see in these new “light” dimensions.
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January 31, 2022 BLACKHOLES - new discoveries to study? 3436
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