Monday, January 2, 2023

3803 - BLACKHOLE MYSTERIES - much more to learn?

 

     3803 – BLACKHOLE  MYSTERIES  -  much more to learn?  By analyzing the evolution of stars in the universe, researchers estimated how often the stars, either on their own or paired into binary systems, would transform into stellar-mass black holes, those with masses 5 to 10 times that of the sun.

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            ---------  3803  -  BLACKHOLE  MYSTERIES  -  much more to learn?  

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            -  Blackholes are a collection of mass that creates so much gravity it even collapses the atoms that are in the mass.  The atoms descend into a blackhole in which nothing can escape, not even light photons. 

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            -  Black holes are giant warps in space and time whose pitch-black nature keeps them mysterious.   In 2022, scientists captured the first photo of Sagittarius A*, the gargantuan black hole at the heart of our Milky Way Galaxy. The “Event Horizon Telescope” captured the image in the light of submillimeter radio waves emitted by hot gas swirling around the edge of the black hole.

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            -    The direct picture is to prove that this gentle giant in the center of our galaxy is a black hole.  It shows a bright ring surrounding the darkness, and the telltale sign of the shadow of the black hole.

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            -    Astronomers discovered another star being ripped apart by a black hole in the galaxy, 850 million light years away. The Hubble Space Telescope was used to examine the aftermath, “AT 2020neh”.  Hubble’s ultraviolet camera saw a ring of stars being formed around the nucleus of this galaxy.

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            -    A once-unknown black hole revealed its existence to astronomers when it shredded apart and gobbled up a star that drifted too close to it. The violent disruption came from an intermediate-mass black hole between around 100,000 and 1 million times the mass of the sun located in dwarf galaxy about 850 million light-years from Earth.

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            -   The cataclysm is an occurrence called a “tidal disruption event” (TDE). The TDE, designated AT 2020neh, became visible when it blasted out a flare of radiation so powerful that it briefly outshone every star in its galaxy combined.

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            -    Astronomers have previously used TDEs to measure the mass of supermassive black holes millions to billions of solar masses in size.

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            -   CLOSEST BLACK HOLE TO EARTH.  In November, 2022, scientists announced a newfound black hole that now holds the record as the closest known one to Earth. “Gaia BH1”, which is about 10 times more massive than our sun,  just 1,560 light-years from our planet, about twice as close as the previous record-holder.

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            -    Gaia BH1 resides in a binary system whose other member is a sunlike star. That star is about as far from its companion black hole as Earth is from the sun.

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            -   FASTEST-GROWING BLACK HOLE EATS 1 EARTH PER SECOND

                 Astronomers have detected the fastest-growing black hole ever seen, devouring the equivalent of one Earth per second. It appears to be the most rapidly growing black hole in the past 9 billion years.

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            -    This black hole currently has a mass 3 billion times that of the sun, making it 500 times bigger than Sagittarius A*,   the supermassive black hole at the heart of the Milky Way. It can fit the entire solar system behind its “event horizon”, the boundary beyond which nothing can escape

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            -    The rush of matter onto the surface of the black hole has resulted in a “quasar” blasting out enough energy to make it 7,000 times brighter than the light from every star in the Milky Way.  This quasar  is the most luminous one known for about the past two-thirds of the universe's 13.8 billion-year existence.  Perhaps two big galaxies crashed into each other, funneling a whole lot of material onto the black hole to feed it.

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            -     ROGUE BLACK HOLE SPOTTED ON ITS OWN.  The kick delivered by a merger event could have ejected a black hole from its galaxy leaving it to wander space alone.  In February, 2022,  astronomers detected an isolated black hole about the mass of a star.  The Hubble Space Telescope discovered the object about 5,150 light-years away from Earth, in the direction of the bulge in the center of the Milky Way.

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            -   Stars big enough to create black holes, ones more than 20 times the mass of the sun, are estimated to make up about one out of a thousand stars, suggesting that in the Milky Way,  there should be about 100 million stellar-mass black holes.

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            -    The researchers estimated the newfound isolated black hole was about 7.1 times the mass of the sun and traveling at a speed of about 100,000 mph. This suggested this black hole may have been propelled by the supernova explosion that gave birth to it.

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            -    SUPER-DISTANT BLACK HOLE BLASTS LEFTOVERS AT EARTH.  In November, 2022, astronomers found the most remote known example yet of a black hole tearing a star apart, all because of a jet of stellar "leftovers" it blasted directly at Earth.

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            -    This event, “AT2022cmc,” occurred about 8.5 billion light-years away, with its light beginning its journey when the 13.8 billion-year-old universe was just one-third of its current age. The researchers estimated the black hole was eating about half the sun's worth of mass each year.

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            -    In about 1% of these instances of violent destruction, known as a tidal disruption events (TDEs), the black hole blasts out jets of plasma and radiation from its poles. We have found only seen a handful of these jetted-TDEs and they remain very exotic and poorly understood events.

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            -    Astronomers are thus constantly hunting for these extreme events to understand how the jets are actually created and why such a small fraction of TDEs produce them.

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            -    BLACK HOLE IS 'BURPING OUT' A 'SPAGHETTIFIED' STAR material swirling around and spewing out of bright spot.  In 2022, three years after a black hole made a spaghetti dinner from a star and gorged itself, the behemoth was spotted again, now burping out the remains.

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            -    When objects such as stars get too close to a black hole, its powerful gravitational field can stretch them in one direction while squashing them in the other direction, thus "spaghettifying" them. As this spaghettified matter falls onto the black hole, it heats up, producing a flash of light that astronomers can spot from millions of light-years away.  Black holes  occasionally spit some of this material back out into space.

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            -    In October, 2018, astronomers detected  a black hole located in a galaxy 665 million light-years from Earth tearing up a star about one-tenth the mass of the sun. Three years later, the black hole was detected spewing the material from its last meal.

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            -    SYNTHETIC BLACK HOLE PROVES STEPHEN HAWKING RIGHT.  In November, 2022, scientists announced that lab simulation of a black hole suggests that one of Stephen Hawking's most famous ideas may be right.

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            -   Quantum physics has found there is no such thing as an empty vacuum. Instead, space is essentially teeming with vibrations that, if charged with enough energy, can burst into pairs of particles and their antiparticles that almost immediately annihilate each other, producing light.

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            -    In 1974, Stephen Hawking predicted that the extreme gravitational fields around the event horizons or mouths of black holes would summon photons into existence in this way.

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            -   Researchers experimentally simulated a black hole using a single-file chain of atoms. When they adjusted the ease at which electrons could hop from one atom to the next in the line so that part of the chain fell over the simulated event horizon, they detected a spike in temperature in the chain, a result that mimicked "Hawking radiation."

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            -  Physicists remain interested in Hawking's prediction because it stands at the intersection of physics' two grand but currently irreconcilable theories: Einstein's theory of general relativity, which describes the cosmos at its largest scales, and quantum mechanics, which describes the strange behavior of its smallest particles.

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            -  BLACK HOLES HAVE QUANTUM PROPERTIES.  Black holes may possess fuzzy quantum properties that suggest they can essentially be at the same time small and big, heavy and light, or dead and alive, just like the legendary “Schrödinger's cat”.

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            -    Quantum physics suggest the universe can become a surreal place at its tiniest scales, with objects capable of superposition, the ability to exist in multiple states at once, such as spinning in two opposite directions simultaneously.

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            -    Scientists developed a computer model that placed a simulated quantum particle just outside a giant simulated black hole. The simulation revealed that the black hole showed evidence of superposition, able to massive and not massive at the same time.

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            -     PREVIOUS CLOSEST BLACK HOLE DOESN'T EXIST.  What once was believed to be the closest black hole to Earth doesn't actually exist, astronomers revealed in March, 2022. 

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            -    In 2020, astronomers discovered evidence that “HR 6819”, just 1,000 light-years away from Earth, was a triple system, with one star closely orbiting a black hole and another star in a wide orbit. However, other scientists disputed the findings, and successfully disproved its existence in 2022.

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            -    Using ESO's Very Large Telescope (VLT) and Very Large Telescope Interferometer (VLTI) for their research they found that it possesses only two stars in a tight orbit, without a black hole. One of the stars is stripping away the mass of the other, a phenomenon that's sometimes referred to as "stellar vampirism.

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            -     GIANT BLACK HOLE ATE STAR IN 1980S, FOUND BY STUDENTS.  With the help of high school interns, astronomers have discovered evidence that a supermassive black hole devoured a star in the 1980s. Although scientists have detected black holes snacking on nearby stars about 100 times, very few of those sightings rely on radio observations, as the 1980s event does.

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            -    By analyzing archival observations from 1986 and 1987, they found the object, “ J1533+2727”, is now 500 times dimmer than it was at its brightest. The event was likely caused by a supermassive black hole 500 million light-years away from Earth, which crushed a star,   tidal disruption event (TDE) spat out a radio jet.

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            -  So far none of the radio-associated TDE seen to date were found in the type of galaxy most popular for TDEs.

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            -    NEEDLE IN A HAYSTACK' BLACK HOLE DISCOVERED.  In July, 2022, astronomers confirmed the first known dormant stellar-mass black hole seen outside the Milky Way.  Dormant black holes are difficult to detect because black holes are normally completely pitch-black. This makes black holes challenging to see against the dark background of space unless they are actively devouring material that can give off light and reveal a black hole's location.

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            -    By scrutinizing six years' worth of data collected the Very Large Telescope, which is located in the Atacama Desert region of Northern Chile, astronomers spotted a black hole that contains about nine times the mass of the sun in the Tarantula Nebula, a star-forming region of a galaxy neighboring ours, the Large Magellanic Cloud. The black hole orbits a huge blue star with a mass equivalent to 25 suns; the duo make up a binary system that has been named VFTS 243.

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            -    Despite the fact that billions of dormant black holes are expected to exist in almost every galaxy, this is the first unambiguous detection of a dormant stellar-mass black hole outside the Milky Way.

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            -    1ST BLACK HOLE PHOTO GETS MAKEOVER.  In August, 2022,  the first-ever image of a black hole, the giant at the heart of the galaxy Messier 87 (M87), was 'remastered' to reveal forces at work around the behemoth.

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            -  The image of the black hole, which is located 55 million light-years away from Earth and has a mass equal to around 6.5 billion suns, was taken by the Event Horizon Telescope and released in 2019.

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            -    RECORD-BREAKING BLACK HOLE ERUPTION.  We started the year 2022 with a record-breaking picture of a black hole eruption that was the most comprehensive radio image yet of the nearest known actively feeding black hole to Earth.

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            -    The image captured radio emissions from material the black hole, a monster with the mass of 55 million suns, spewed out at nearly the speed of light. Gigantic lobes of plasma spreading more than a million light-years away from the center of the black hole's home galaxy, Centaurus A, some 12 million light-years from Earth. This eruption could cover 16 full moons in the sky.

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            -    40 QUINTILLION BLACK HOLES IN THE UNIVERSE  each about the mass of a star that altogether make up 1% of the universe's normal matter, astronomers announced in January. That's 40,000,000,000,000,000,000.

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            January 1, 2022   BLACKHOLE  MYSTERIES  -  much more to learn?                      3899                                                                                                                               

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            --------------------- ---  Monday, January 2, 2023  ---------------------------

             

             

             

             

                     

             

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