7 Weird Facts About Black Holes

Black holes are perhaps the most fascinating characteristics of our universe in our universe. Like long dark tunnels nowhere (or giant eliminations), these mysterious lighting in space have a gravitational traction so captivating as nothing close – not even light – can escape from being swallowed. What is happening, (especially) never goes out. (More about this later.)

For this reason, black holes are invisible to the eye, as clear as the empty and dark space that surrounds them. Scientists know that they do not exist because they can see a real hole, but because the formidable gravitational tightening of a black hole affects the orbits of stars and gas nearby. Another clue is the detectable radiation issued as gas which is suckled is overheated. In fact, these strong X-ray emissions led to the discovery of the first black hole, Cygnus X-1 in the Cygnus constellation, in 1964.

If it all looks like science fiction, read the rest. This is only the tip of the cosmic iceberg. As scientists discover it, black holes are even stranger than science fiction. Here are seven mysteries to meditate.

1. Black holes deform time and space around them

If you had stolen from a black hole, its extreme gravitational traction would slow the time and the deformation space more and more. You would be more and more pulled, gradually joining an accretion disc of space materials in orbit (stars, gas, dust, planets) in a spiral inward towards the horizon of the event or “point of no return”. Once you have crossed this border, gravity would overcome every chance of escaping and you would be super stretched, or “spaghetified” when you had plunged towards the singularity in the center of the black hole – an inconceivably small point with a monstrous mass where gravity and density theoretically approach infinity and spatio -time curves. In other words, you would be engulfed and destroyed in a place that completely defies the laws of physics as we understand them.

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2. Black holes are available in miniature, intermediaries and mammoths

AVERAGE Black holes of stellar mass are the most common type. They are formed when a massive dying star, or supernova, explodes and the remaining nucleus collapses from the weight of its own gravity. Finally, it is compressed in a tiny infinitely dense singularity that forms the center. In truth, black holes are therefore not really holes, but very compact points of matter with excessive gravitational imprints. The black holes of stellar mass generally weigh about 10 times more than our sun, although scientists have discovered some that are much larger.

Supermassive black holes are the largest in the universe, some with masses of billions of times those of our sun. Scientists do not fully understand how they form, but these huge celestial bogles can have appeared shortly after the Big Bang and existed in the center of each galaxy, even the smallest. Our own galaxy of the spiral Milky Way around the Sagittarius A * (or Sgr a *), which contains the mass of around 4 million suns.

Researchers also recently discovered Street black holes Who seem to devour material and gases at a slower rate, which means that fewer X -rays are issued, so they are more difficult to detect. Astronomers also believe that there are tiny primordial black holes Formed within seconds after the Big Bang. These mini-mysteries have not yet been observed, but the smallest can be more tiny than a atom (but with the mass of an asteroid), and the universe can growl.

3. There are too many black holes from

It is believed that the galaxy of the Milky Way alone housed between 10 million to a billion black holes of stellar mass, the more Sgr has supermassive in its heart. With 100 billion galaxies there, each with millions of black holes of stellar mass and a basic supermassive monster (not to mention other types discovered), it’s like trying to count sand grains.

4. Black holes devour things – and spit them regularly

The assured black holes of rest do not roam the universe as hungry predators, hunting planets and other space prey for dinner. On the contrary, these celestial animals are delighted on equipment that orbit too close, like this unhappy star that scientists have seen being swallowed in the last decade (the longest meal with a black hole never recorded). The good news is that the earth is not on a collision trajectory with known black holes.

But just because we are unlikely to be abundant that we should not worry. This is because Sgr has * (and probably other supermassive giants) which sometimes launch “Spit balls” the size of a planet that could one day make us.

How do Spit balls escape the claws of a black hole? They are actually made of material which slides from the accretion disc before passing the point of no return and is based in pieces. In the case of SGR A *, these heavy parts are spit in our galaxy up to 20 million miles per hour. Hoping that we never zoomed too close to our solar system.

5. Supermassive black holes also give birth to the stars and determine the number of stars that a galaxy obtains

In the same way that the fragments of the size of the planet are expelled from the accretion disc, a recent discovery shows that the black holes of the giant sometimes do not relax enough to form new whole stars. Even more remarkable, some even land in deep space, far beyond their original galaxy.

And a 2018 study in the Revue Nature suggests that the supermassive black holes create not only new stars, but they control the number of stars that a galaxy obtains by impacting directly at what speed the star formation process goes out. The training of stars, perhaps strangely, stops faster in the galaxies with smaller black holes – in a way – in the center.

Learn more about the formation of black hole stars:

6. It is possible to look in the abyss

The new horizon of event telescope – powered by nine of the highest resolution telescopes in the world – recently took photos of the first time of the event horizons surrounding two black holes. One is our own SGR A * and the other is a supermassive black hole in the center of the Galaxy Messier at 87, 53 million light years. The image of the latter, now nicknamed Powehi, astronomers amazed in April 2019, but the photo shoot also raised a new interest in the questions in progress on what the black holes and the laws of physics of physics lead them look like.

7. Still another black hole head

Astronomers from South Africa recently fell on a distant area of ​​space where supermassive black holes in several galaxies are aligned in the same direction. That is to say, their gas emissions have all extinguished as if they had been synchronized by design. Current theories cannot explain how black holes up to 300 million light years away from each other seem to act in concert. In fact, the only way it is possible, say the researchers is that if these black holes run in the same direction – something that could have happened during the formation of galaxies in the early universe.