Black holes are the most mysterious object in all of science. Any questions related to them are questions that affect the universe as a whole. Defining black holes is not easy. According to physicists, this phenomenon is a kind of product of gravity, which has reached colossal magnitudes. As a result, areas appear in space so dense that even light is not able to overcome their gravitational attraction. The substance absorbed by the black hole heats up and, plunging into the "abyss", begins to emit very high energy. This radiation also includes X-rays, which can be detected by telescopes in near-earth orbit.
It is known that black holes "swallow" not only nearby physical objects, but also light. For this reason, they are invisible; it is possible to detect the presence of such phenomena in space only on the basis of indirect signs.
Black holes appear after the death of large stars (they are mainly observed in distant quasars, in the exploding nuclei of galaxies). Black holes have a number of absolutely fantastic properties: the properties of space change inside them, time slows down. These two fundamental components of our being in a unique zone are twisted into a funnel; theorists believe that in its depths space and time decay into quanta.
In fact, we are dealing with a gravitational trap, from which there is no way out. Moreover, this abyss simply lacks … the observed surface. If neutron stars have strong magnetic fields and strictly periodic pulsations of X-rays, then black holes are characterized by uncalculable fluctuations of radiation. By the way, one more feature: this phenomenon is unique in the amount of energy accumulated in it. There are no objects in the universe that contain more of it than black holes. In fact, we have before us an inexhaustible source!
The black hole originally appeared on paper when, in the 18th century, scientists - Mitchell and Laplace - drew attention to the "prediction" contained in Newtonian theory. A mathematical solution to this problem was seen later. At the beginning of the 19th century, Pierre Laplace first spoke about the theoretical possibility of the existence of black holes. In the famous "Course of Theoretical Physics" Lev Landau and Evgeny Lifshitz called this riddle of the Universe the most beautiful of all existing theories, and Max Born admired it "as a creation of art."
This object evokes this kind of attitude among practically the entire scientific community. But, apparently, the American physicist K. Thorne expressed the most poetically: “Of all the inventions of the human mind, from unicorns and chimeras to the hydrogen bomb, the most fantastic is the image of a black hole, the border of which nothing can cross, and even light is delayed by it stranglehold."
In our time, using orbiting telescopes for observation, scientists have established interesting facts. As it turned out, black holes are divided into two types. The first of them includes massive objects, the dimensions of which are on the order of three masses of our star. The second is the so-called supermassive (ranging from a million to a billion solar masses). Now specialists have fixed the location of about 20 massive and about 200 supermassive black holes. In addition, about 220 more places were identified, in which these objects may be located.
“The main mystery of the Universe” never ceases to give researchers information for thought. So, many questions arise in connection with the discovery of small but supermassive black holes. For example, the object located in the center of the galaxy NGC 4395 in the constellation Canine Hounds is curious because, contrary to mathematical calculations, it emits X-rays surprisingly intensely. This black hole is as powerful as its especially large "relatives" in the centers of other galaxies. But this "invisibility" is heavier than the Sun "only" 50,000 times, while ordinary supermassive black holes, as a rule, are millions and billions of times more massive than our star.
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The presence of small in size, but especially powerful "mysteries of the Universe" can explain the properties of one of the types of active galaxies. It is believed that there are "invisibles" in their center; such galaxies are less bright than quasars, but emit large amounts of X-rays.
Supermassive black holes radiate much more energy into the universe than all stars combined. Moreover, many of these objects were presumably formed relatively recently; the researchers believe that at least 15 percent of all supermassive black holes originated when the universe was half its age.
At the moment, the "invisible" also continue to grow. In the last two or three years, it has become clear that the Universe is not only expanding, but is also doing it with a pretty decent acceleration. It is provided by huge invisible masses of matter. The mysterious "blank spots" of the universe produce 30 percent of the energy due to which the expansion takes place. But where another 70 percent come from is still unknown (scientists call this part "the dark energy of the Universe").
The masses of the mysterious objects that form as a result of the collapse of gas clouds are from millions to billions of times the mass of stars. The dimensions of such "islands of darkness" are comparable to the size of our solar system. Moreover, according to astronomers, supermassive black holes are contained in the center of most galaxies. Ours with you is also no exception to the general rule. Moreover, recent observations of supermassive "invisibles" orbiting each other in the center of NGC 6240 (in the constellation Ophiuchus) suggested that in the event of a merger of galaxies, their black holes also merge. This process takes several hundred billion years to complete.
In fact, black holes are unexplored elements of our Universe, a kind of "white spots". But nevertheless, modern physics actually requires this phenomenon to exist. And in sufficient quantity. And there are actually surprisingly many such active galactic sources. In the X-ray range, we see 10 times more galaxies than in the most detailed optical surveys!
So, it turned out that this phenomenon is quite common in the Universe. Therefore, in the last decade, a new promising scientific direction has emerged - the demography of black holes. It studies the distribution of these mysterious objects in space and their interaction with other material objects.
Stephen Hawking - a man who is called "the most mysterious scientist of our time", pays special attention to the study of black holes. By the way, he is the head of the department in Cambridge, which was once occupied by Isaac Newton. It should be mentioned here that this brilliant British physicist, who has 12 scientific degrees, winner of the Nobel Prize (1998) and the Order of Honor, a member of the Royal Scientific Society of Great Britain and the US National Academy of Sciences, has been suffering from a rare form of atrophic sclerosis for almost a quarter of a century, which turned him into cripple. Hawking moves only thanks to a wheelchair with an electric motor, lectures at the university using an electronic voice synthesizer (his own slurred speech is understood only by close professors - his wife and three children). The scientist's contact with the external environment is provided by a unique computer,which this unique man controls with the only active finger of his left hand …
Based on years of work, Hawking concluded that the quantum evaporation of black holes is inevitable. This means that these objects die. An interesting attempt to correlate the size and mass of the amazing "white spots" of the universe. In particular, the calculations of the British scientist showed: a black hole weighing one billion tons (the mass of a mountain) would have … the size of a neutron or a proton. By the way, the professor is convinced that the time of the formation of the mysterious "invisibility" exceeds the lifetime of the Universe itself! True, the quantum theory of black holes does not yet exist, which means that the processes pointed out by Stephen Hawking are currently not fully understood.
The close attention of scientists to the problem of the existence of "invisible" is explained by very good reasons. Relatively recently, the American Hubble telescope recorded an interesting, but not too pleasant fact: the black hole GROJ 1655-40 from the constellation Scorpio is heading straight towards our Sun. The unknown monster is, of course, far from us - at a distance of 6,000 light years. However, there is cause for concern. The speed of this object inspires respect: it is 40,000 kilometers per hour! In the course of its movement, the black hole "eats" the stars. Apparently, the same will happen in a far from bright future and with our own Sun. And while scientists are trying to figure out what this attack is.
Stephen Hawking, in the summer of 2004, announced that he had completely revealed the secret of black holes - the main mystery of space. For this, the astrophysicist combined the theory of relativity and quantum mechanics into a single theory. Hawking argues that black holes are by no means huge "mass graves" of stars, some kind of "all-consuming" substance. Back in the 1970s, the scientist proved that the exchange of energy between a given object and external space is quite possible. Black holes - "the place where the classical concept of space and time is destroyed, as well as all the known laws of physics" - is not the end of the universe. They eject ray streams and are ordinary evolving objects.
However, this discovery caused a paradox: the British professor assured that the energy coming from the black hole does not contain any "information" about the absorbed matter. Then after the evaporation of the "invisibility" not a trace remains of it, therefore, no information remains. And this is contrary to all the laws of quantum mechanics. Stephen Hawking has been trying to resolve this paradox for 30 years.
Now the professor believes that mysterious "blank spots" still allow information to come out; then falling into a black hole is "not a one-way ticket." According to Hawking's theory, the "invisible" do not have a clearly defined horizon of events that hides everything in them from the outside world, and do not destroy the falling bodies completely and without a trace. Instead, victims of the gravitational trap continue to emit energy for extended periods of time while the "black hole is just forming." “But later, the horizon opens and releases information about what has fallen inward, so that we can check the past and can predict the future,” the scientist assures. True, his next statement immediately disappointed fans of science fiction: “If you fall into a black hole, your mass-energy will be returned to our universe,but in a disfigured form."
By the way, the mysterious "invisible", as it turned out, are able to "sing"! That is, sound waves emanate from them. For example, a similar object from the constellation Perseus (about 250 million light years from Earth) constantly "purrs" the note corresponding to B flat, and 57 octaves below the first octave. What is it? Evidence of the process by which the dust cloud surrounding the black hole is heated? Apparently so. But still, the imagination paints a picture that is very far from science: after listening to another batch of assumptions and guesses about his own person, the grandiose "invisible" continues to ironically laugh at the scientists, singing to himself a simple song of Time …
V. Syadro T. Iovleva O. Ochkurova