![]() ![]() Read: The Milky Way's center is a cornucopia of black holes These elements make up our Earth, and our own selves. The collisions of black holes and neutron stars help spread heavier elements, such as gold and platinum. The stellar explosions that produce black holes also spew elements such as carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen into space. If anything, we benefit from their existence. That nearby black hole is no threat to Earth. ![]() The variety in discoveries is quite impressive for an object best known for its nothingness. (Some even appear to be so big that, theoretically, they shouldn’t exist.) Earlier this year, astronomers found the closest known black hole to Earth 1,000 light-years away, almost on our doorstep by cosmic measures, in a constellation that can be seen with the naked eye. Black holes, it turns out, are everywhere, in the center of most galaxies and spread throughout them, and they come in different sizes. And they have felt them in the ripples in the fabric of space-time, the gravitational waves that fan out across the universe when two black holes collide. They have seen black holes in the glow coming from matter as it plunges into the invisible depths, a process so intense that particles light up beautifully. Read: About that monstrous black hole we’re all orbitingĪstronomers have found other black holes, too, by watching for the dizzying orbits of the unlucky stars around them. This region in our galaxy, known as Sagittarius A* (pronounced ay-star), has a mass 4 million times that of our sun, squeezed into a space smaller than our solar system. They discovered stars orbiting a seemingly empty spot at startling speeds, a chaotic environment that could make sense only in the presence of a supermassive black hole. Genzel and Ghez spent many years poking into the cosmic cloud of interstellar gas and dust at the very center of the galaxy, with the world’s largest telescopes. Such a thing might still seem too incredible to exist, but without black holes, the movements of faraway stars in our galaxy don’t always make sense. In 1965, after Einstein’s death, Penrose, the Oxford professor, published a paper showing, mathematically, that the forces of the universe could indeed produce black holes, and that inside their impenetrable depths resides something called a singularity, an inscrutable point which no known laws of physics can describe. Entire stars, once luminous, can be extinguished if they cross a black hole’s boundary, and pass the point of no return.Īlbert Einstein predicted more than a century ago, based on his theories untangling the nature of gravity, that such strange objects could exist, but he thought the idea was too far-fetched. ![]() ![]() Forged from the cores of dead stars, they are so dense that nothing can escape their gravitational pull, not even light, which renders them invisible. Read: The absurdity of the Nobel Prizes in scienceīlack holes are among the most mysterious phenomena in the universe. (Ghez, it’s worth noting, is only the fourth woman to receive the honor in nearly 120 years of Nobel history.) Half the prize went to Roger Penrose, of the University of Oxford, who showed that black holes could exist, and half went to Reinhard Genzel, of the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics and UC Berkeley, and Andrea Ghez, of UCLA, who provided the most convincing evidence that a particular black hole-the supermassive one at the center of our Milky Way-did. Yesterday, the Nobel Committee recognized decades of black-hole research by awarding its physics prize to three scientists. Not so long ago, scientists couldn’t say with much confidence that black holes existed, nor did they know that a giant one sits at the center of our own galaxy. To anyone more familiar with black holes from epic space films, this one mostly looked like a flame-glazed donut.īut that portrait is one of the most extraordinary achievements in modern science, a display of humankind’s capacity to reach across light-years. The reaction of the public did not necessarily match the unalloyed joy of astronomers accustomed to extracting cosmic wonders from lines in a graph. Seen in silhouette, it appeared fuzzy, as did the ring of hot gas surrounding it. The first picture ever captured of a black hole, one situated in the center of another galaxy, was pretty blurry. ![]()
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