What does a black hole really look like?
Black holes live up to their names: The great gravitational beasts emit no light in any part of the electromagnetic spectrum, so they themselves don’t look like much.
But astronomers know the objects are there because of a black hole’s entourage. As a black hole’s gravity pulls in gas and dust, matter settles into an orbiting disk, with atoms jostling one another at extreme speeds. All that activity heats the matter white-hot, so it emits X-rays and other high-energy radiation. The most voraciously feeding black holes in the universe have disks that outshine all the stars in their galaxies (SN Online: 3/16/18).
Does general relativity hold up close to a black hole?
The exact shape of the ring may help break one of the most frustrating stalemates in theoretical physics.
The twin pillars of physics are Einstein’s theory of general relativity, which governs massive and gravitationally rich things like black holes, and quantum mechanics, which governs the weird world of subatomic particles. Each works precisely in its own domain. But they can’t work together.
“General relativity as it is and quantum mechanics as it is are incompatible with each other,” says physicist Lia Medeiros of the University of Arizona in Tucson. “Rock, hard place. Something has to give.” If general relativity buckles at a black hole’s boundary, it may point the way forward for theorists.
Since black holes are the most extreme gravitational environments in the universe, they’re the best environment to crash test theories of gravity. It’s like throwing theories at a wall and seeing whether — or how — they break. If general relativity does hold up, scientists expect that the black hole will have a particular shadow and thus ring shape; if Einstein’s theory of gravity breaks down, a different shadow.
Do stellar corpses called pulsars surround the Milky Way’s black hole?
Another way to test general relativity around black holes is to watch how stars careen around them. As light flees the extreme gravity in a black hole’s vicinity, its waves get stretched out, making the light appear redder. This process, called gravitational redshift, is predicted by general relativity and was observed near SgrA* last year (SN: 8/18/18, p. 12). So far, so good for Einstein.
An even better way to do the same test would be with a pulsar, a rapidly spinning stellar corpse that sweeps the sky with a beam of radiation in a regular cadence that makes it appear to pulse (SN: 3/17/18, p. 4). Gravitational redshift would mess up the pulsars’ metronomic pacing, potentially giving a far more precise test of general relativity.
How do some black holes make jets?
Some black holes are ravenous gluttons, pulling in massive amounts of gas and dust, while others are picky eaters. No one knows why. SgrA* seems to be one of the fussy ones, with a surprisingly dim accretion disk despite its 4 million solar mass heft. EHT’s other target, the black hole in galaxy M87, is a voracious eater, weighing in at between about 3.5 billion and 7.22 billion solar masses. And it doesn’t just amass a bright accretion disk. It also launches a bright, fast jet of charged subatomic particles that stretches for about 5,000 light-years.
0 comments:
Post a Comment