Wednesday, May 24, 2023

BLACKHOLES - monsters or creators?

 

-    4020  -  BLACKHOLES  -  monsters or creators?   Blackholes are those monster gravity sink holes in outer space that swallow everything that comes near them and devours them forever, or ?????



------------------------   4020   -   BLACKHOLES  -  monsters or creators?

-  Or, Blackholes are the creative forces that formed the unique galactic structure of our Universe.  We would not exist without them.

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-  Which is it, Blackholes the agents of destruction , or, the pillars of creation?

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-  Blackholes have so much gravity that even light photons can not escape the pull and everything is pulled inside to a singularity of infinite density.

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-  Blackholes were for a long time in theory only.  No evidence could be found for their actual existence.  Evidence was found where objects had so much mass and so little volume they could theoretically only be a Blackhole.  They were first thought to be rare occurrences.  Today, not so.  We think massive Blackholes are at the center of galaxies and that small Blackholes are common

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-  The oldest Blackhole found to date is 13 billion lightyears away.  So, what we observe happened 13 billion years ago.  It took that long for the light to reach us.  If it still exists today, that is how old it is.  The Big Bang happened 13.7 billion years ago.  Therefore within 1 billion years after the Big Bang Blackholes were forming.

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-  After the Big Bang the first stars formed were 100 times more massive than our Sun.  They burned all their fuel in less than 1 million years and exploded.  When these giant stars went supernova their cores were so big their gravity collapsed all matter into a super dense Blackhole.

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-  Blackholes were closer together back then in the early Universe so mergers happened quite frequently.  Blackholes grew to 1 billion solar mass by 840 million years after the Big Bang.

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-  Astronomers can not see Blackholes, obviously.  What they can see it the brilliantly hot gases swirling around in the accretion disk before the gas gets sucked in by the enormous pull of gravity.  Surrounding these hot accretion disks were star forming galaxies.

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-  Visible matter alone in the galaxies could not account for their structures.  Invisible matter at least 10 times more massive must exist surrounding the galaxy for the math to work out.  The invisible matter is called Dark Matter.

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-  Galaxies collided and merged into bigger galaxies.  The bigger galaxies became even more star friendly because the mergers created shockwaves through space that compressed dense clumps of gas triggering star birth.

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-    Our Milky Way Blackhole is Safittarius A.  It weighs 4.5 million solar mass.  If you get within 10 million kilometers ( 6.2 million miles) of this Blackhole time begins to slow down, light reddens, and dims until you pass the Event Horizon and are frozen in time, gone forever.

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-    At the Event Horizon General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics predict different results leaving a mystery of what physics to apply to understanding what is inside a Blackhole.  Physicists are inventing new math to bring Relativity and Quantum Mechanics together, called Quantum Gravity and String Theory, and other theories.

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-      Relativity can completely characterize a Blackhole with 3 simple numbers, its mass, its charge, and its spin.In falling gas and dust create energy and radiation greater than anything known.Energy that is 20 times more powerful than nuclear fusion.  In this way Blackholes are the brightest objects in the Universe.                                                                                                                                                          -

 -      Enormous magnetic fields are created by the swirling charge particles in the accretion disk.  In some mysterious way jets are created and shot out of the poles at 99.98% the speed of light.  These jet beams are tightly collimated and travel distances greater than the size of galaxies.

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-  A 15 solar mass Blackhole would have an Event Horizon of only 90 kilometers ( 56 miles).  A billion solar mass Blackhole would have an Event Horizon that would fit inside our Solar System.  Material circling a Blackhole is traveling so fast it completes one orbit in a microsecond, 0.000001 seconds.

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-  Astronomers determine the mass of Blackholes by measuring the orbits of stars near it.  They measure the orbital velocities of the accretion disks by the shift in the florescence of iron atoms on the surface of these disks.  Velocities range close to 30% the speed of light.

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-  When Blackholes collide and merge they shake the fabric of spacetime crating gravity waves like ripples on a pond.  Astronomers are detecting these waves using massive laser interferometers.

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-  Besides Sagittarius A to study there is another Blackhole in M87 that is 55 million lightyears away.  It is 6.4 solar mass with jets extending out 5,000 lightyears.  Sagittarius A is 24,000 lightyears away.

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-    One objective is to image these Blackholes through gravitational lensing of light that is behind the Blackhole and gets bent by the gravity as it passes by.  But getting this image would be like taking a picture of a poppy seed in L.A. looking at it from New York.

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-     To see something this small we need larger telescopes operating at smaller wavelengths.  Infrared wavelengths pass through the dust clouds so they have an advantage over visible light.  Infrared telescope would have an angular scale of 55 micro arc seconds and need to be 7 kilometers in diameter. Not too practical.  Using millimeter radio waves it would require a telescope 5,000 kilometers in diameter.

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-    But, radio telescopes located around the globe could do just that.  We just need to connect them together to a single computer to create an interferometer with antennas 5,000 apart.  It is called a VLBI, very long baseline interferometer.  When these are working we should be able to image a Blackhole from the gravitational lensing of light directly behind the Blackhole.  Studying these images should unlock many of the mysteries of Blackholes.  In turn, we should learn more about the creation of the Universe.  What do you think could astronomy do such a thing?

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May 23, 2023        BLACKHOLES  -  monsters or creators?  1096         4020                                                                                                                        

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--------------------- ---  Wednesday, May 24, 2023  ---------------------------------

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