The Universe's Exit Door, The Point Of No Return Measured For The First Time
For the first time, an international team has measured the radius of a black hole.
The point of no return: In astronomy, it’s known as a black hole — a region in space where the pull of gravity is so strong that nothing, not even light, can escape. Black holes that can be billions of times more massive than our sun may reside at the heart of most galaxies. Such supermassive black holes are so powerful that activity at their boundaries can ripple throughout their host galaxies.
This image, created using computer models, shows how the extreme gravity of the black hole in M87 distorts the appearance of the jet near the event horizon. Part of the radiation from the jet is bent by gravity into a ring that is known as the ‘shadow’ of the black hole.
Image: Avery E. Broderick (Perimeter Institute & University of Waterloo)
Now, an international team, led by researchers at MIT’s Haystack Observatory, has for the first time measured the radius of a black hole at the center of a distant galaxy — the closest distance at which matter can approach before being irretrievably pulled into the black hole.
The scientists linked together radio dishes in Hawaii, Arizona and California to create a telescope array called the “Event Horizon Telescope” (EHT) that can see details 2,000 times finer than what’s visible to the Hubble Space Telescope. These radio dishes were trained on M87, a galaxy some 50 million light years from the Milky Way. M87 harbors a black hole 6 billion times more massive than our sun; using this array, the team observed the glow of matter near the edge of this black hole — a region known as the “event horizon.”
Credit: NASA and the Hubble Heritage Team
“Once objects fall through the event horizon, they’re lost forever,” says Shep Doeleman, assistant director at the MIT Haystack Observatory and research associate at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory. “It’s an exit door from our universe. You walk through that door, you’re not coming back.”
Doeleman and his colleagues have published the results of their study this week in the journal Science.
Jets at the edge of a black hole
Supermassive black holes are the most extreme objects predicted by Albert Einstein’s theory of gravity — where, according to Doeleman, “gravity completely goes haywire and crushes an enormous mass into an incredibly close space.” At the edge of a black hole, the gravitational force is so strong that it pulls in everything from its surroundings. However, not everything can cross the event horizon to squeeze into a black hole. The result is a “cosmic traffic jam” in which gas and dust build up, creating a flat pancake of matter known as an accretion disk. This disk of matter orbits the black hole at nearly the speed of light, feeding the black hole a steady diet of superheated material. Over time, this disk can cause the black hole to spin in the same direction as the orbiting material.
An accretion disk (orange) of gas and dust surrounds super-massive black holes at the center of most galaxies. These disks of galactic matter emit magnetic beams (pink lines) that spew out from the center of the black hole, drawing matter out from both ends in high-powered jets.
Image: NASA and Ann Field (Space Telescope Science Institute)
Caught up in this spiraling flow are magnetic fields, which accelerate hot material along powerful beams above the accretion disk The resulting high-speed jet, launched by the black hole and the disk, shoots out across the galaxy, extending for hundreds of thousands of light-years. These jets can influence many galactic processes, including how fast stars form.
‘Is Einstein right?’
A jet’s trajectory may help scientists understand the dynamics of black holes in the region where their gravity is the dominant force. Doeleman says such an extreme environment is perfect for confirming Einstein’s theory of general relativity — today’s definitive description of gravitation.
“Einstein’s theories have been verified in low-gravitational field cases, like on Earth or in the solar system,” Doeleman says. “But they have not been verified precisely in the only place in the universe where Einstein’s theories might break down — which is right at the edge of a black hole.”
According to Einstein’s theory, a black hole’s mass and its spin determine how closely material can orbit before becoming unstable and falling in toward the event horizon. Because M87’s jet is magnetically launched from this smallest orbit, astronomers can estimate the black hole’s spin through careful measurement of the jet’s size as it leaves the black hole. Until now, no telescope has had the magnifying power required for this kind of observation.
Credit: Chris Fach (Perimeter Institute & University of Waterloo)
“We are now in a position to ask the question, ‘Is Einstein right?’” Doeleman says. “We can identify features and signatures predicted by his theories, in this very strong gravitational field.”
The team used a technique called Very Long Baseline Interferometry, or VLBI, which links data from radio dishes located thousands of miles apart. Signals from the various dishes, taken together, create a “virtual telescope” with the resolving power of a single telescope as big as the space between the disparate dishes. The technique enables scientists to view extremely precise details in faraway galaxies.
Using the technique, Doeleman and his team measured the innermost orbit of the accretion disk to be only 5.5 times the size of the black hole event horizon. According to the laws of physics, this size suggests that the accretion disk is spinning in the same direction as the black hole — the first direct observation to confirm theories of how black holes power jets from the centers of galaxies.
The team plans to expand its telescope array, adding radio dishes in Chile, Europe, Mexico, Greenland and Antarctica, in order to obtain even more detailed pictures of black holes in the future.
Christopher Reynolds, a professor of astronomy at the University of Maryland, says the group’s results provide the first observational data that will help scientists understand how a black hole’s jets behave.
“The basic nature of jets is still mysterious,” Reynolds says. “Many astrophysicists suspect that jets are powered by black hole spin … but right now, these ideas are still entirely in the realm of theory. This measurement is the first step in putting these ideas on a firm observational basis.”
This research was supported by the National Science Foundation.
Flashing, Merging Black Holes
According to Einstein, whenever massive objects interact, they produce gravitational waves — distortions in the very fabric of space and time — that ripple outward across the universe at the speed of light. While astronomers have found indirect evidence of these disturbances, the waves have so far eluded direct detection. Ground-based observatories designed to find them are on the verge of achieving greater sensitivities, and many scientists think that this discovery is just a few years away.
Catching gravitational waves from some of the strongest sources — colliding black holes with millions of times the sun’s mass — will take a little longer. These waves undulate so slowly that they won’t be detectable by ground-based facilities. Instead, scientists will need much larger space-based instruments, such as the proposed Laser Interferometer Space Antenna, which was endorsed as a high-priority future project by the astronomical community.
A team that includes astrophysicists at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., is looking forward to that day by using computational models to explore the mergers of supersized black holes. Their most recent work investigates what kind of “flash” might be seen by telescopes when astronomers ultimately find gravitational signals from such an event.
Supercomputer models of merging black holes reveal properties that are crucial to understanding future detections of gravitational waves. This movie follows two orbiting black holes and their accretion disk during their final three orbits and ultimate merger. Redder colors correspond to higher gas densities.
› Download video in high resolution from NASA Goddard’s Scientific Visualization Studio
Studying gravitational waves will give astrophysicists an unprecedented opportunity to witness the universe’s most extreme phenomena, leading to new insights into the fundamental laws of physics, the death of stars, the birth of black holes and, perhaps, the earliest moments of the universe.
A black hole is an object so massive that nothing, not even light, can escape its gravitational grip. Most big galaxies, including our own Milky Way, contain a central black hole weighing millions of times the sun’s mass, and when two galaxies collide, their monster black holes settle into a close binary system.
“The black holes orbit each other and lose orbital energy by emitting strong gravitational waves, and this causes their orbits to shrink. The black holes spiral toward each other and eventually merge,” said Goddard astrophysicist John Baker.
Simulation of the merger of two black holes and the resulting emission of gravitational radiation. The colored fields represent a component of the curvature of space-time. The outer red sheets correspond directly to the outgoing gravitational radiation that one day may be detected by gravitational-wave observatories. The brighter yellow areas near the black holes do not correspond to physical structures but generally indicate where the strong non-linear gravitational-field interactions are in play.
Credit: NASA/C. Henze
Close to these titanic, rapidly moving masses, space and time become repeatedly flexed and warped. Just as a disturbance forms ripples on the surface of a pond, drives seismic waves through Earth, or puts the jiggle in a bowl of Jell-O, the cyclic flexing of space-time near binary black holes produces waves of distortion that race across the universe.
While gravitational waves promise to tell astronomers many things about the bodies that created them, they cannot provide one crucial piece of information — the precise position of the source. So to really understand a merger event, researchers need an accompanying electromagnetic signal — a flash of light, ranging from radio waves to X-rays — that will allow telescopes to pinpoint the merger’s host galaxy.
Understanding the electromagnetic counterparts that may accompany a merger involves the daunting task of tracking the complex interactions between the black holes, which can be moving at more than half the speed of light in the last few orbits, and the disks of hot, magnetized gas that surround them. Since 2010, numerous studies using simplifying assumptions have found that mergers could produce a burst of light, but no one knew how commonly this occurred or whether the emission would be strong enough to be detectable from Earth.
Credit: NASA/C. Henze
To explore the problem in greater detail, a team led by Bruno Giacomazzo at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and including Baker developed computer simulations that for the first time show what happens in the magnetized gas (also called a plasma) in the last stages of a black hole merger. Their study was published in the June 10 edition of The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
The simulations follow the complex electrical and magnetic interactions in the ionized gas — known as magnetohydrodynamics — within the extreme gravitational environment determined by the equations of Einstein’s general relativity, a task requiring the use of advanced numerical codes and fast supercomputers.
Both of the simulations reported in the study were run on the Pleiades supercomputer at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif. They follow the black holes over their last three orbits and subsequent merger using models both with and without a magnetic field in the gas disk.
Credit: NASA/C. Henze
Additional simulations were run on the Ranger and Discover supercomputers, respectively located at the University of Texas, Austin, and the NASA Center for Climate Simulation at Goddard, in order to investigate the effects of different initial conditions, fewer orbits and other variations.
“What’s striking in the magnetic simulation is that the disk’s initial magnetic field is rapidly intensified by about 100 times, and the merged black hole is surrounded by a hotter, denser, thinner accretion disk than in the unmagnetized case,” Giacomazzo explained.
In the turbulent environment near the merging black holes, the magnetic field intensifies as it becomes twisted and compressed. The team suggests that running the simulation for additional orbits would result in even greater amplification.
Credit: NASA/C. Henze
The most interesting outcome of the magnetic simulation is the development of a funnel-like structure — a cleared-out zone that extends up out of the accretion disk near the merged black hole. “This is exactly the type of structure needed to drive the particle jets we see from the centers of black-hole-powered active galaxies,” Giacomazzo said.
The most important aspect of the study is the brightness of the merger’s flash. The team finds that the magnetic model produces beamed emission that is some 10,000 times brighter than those seen in previous studies, which took the simplifying step of ignoring plasma effects in the merging disks.
Credit: NASA/C. Henze
“We need gravitational waves to confirm that a black hole merger has occurred, but if we can understand the electromagnetic signatures from mergers well enough, perhaps we can search for candidate events even before we have a space-based gravitational wave observatory,” Baker said.
This computer simulation shows a star being shredded by the gravity of a massive black hole. Some of the stellar debris falls into the black hole and some of it is ejected into space at high speeds. The areas in white are regions of highest density, with progressively redder colors corresponding to lower-density regions. The blue dot pinpoints the black hole’s location. The elapsed time corresponds to the amount of time it takes for a Sun-like star to be ripped apart by a black hole a million times more massive than the Sun.
See Also:
Contacts and sources:
Sarah McDonnell
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Related links:
Paper: “Jet-Launching Structure Resolved Near the Supermassive Black Hole in M87″
Shep Doeleman
MIT Haystack Observatory
Francis Reddy
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
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Whistler Blowers, Insiders
According to theory, “new event horizons” (as mentioned by the above article) are the ultimate occurrence in physics, when two different dimensions meet and, for a nanosecond, time actually stops.
History’s most famous (and significant) new event horizon happened around 2,000 years ago in Jerusalem, when the undecayed corpse of a crucified Jew became suspended in between two dimensions and, emitting a split-second flash of unknown laser-like light (flash photolysis), resurrected from the dead, leaving a stereoscopic (three-dimensional) image of his body in his burial cloth, now known as the Shroud of Turin (which remains the most intensely studied holy artifact in human history.)
Equally astounding is the fact that his body was anatomically perfect. In the realm of human physiology, anatomical perfection is impossible, and that’s why no other case of it has ever been recorded.
Whatever astrophysicists discover in the heavens has already occurred right here on Earth to the one who created the heavens and died a gruesomely painful death on a cross to redeem mankind from its sins.
“Very small samples from the Shroud of Turin have been dated by accelerator mass spectrometry in laboratories at Arizona, Oxford and Zurich. As controls, three samples whose ages had been determined independently were also dated. The results provide conclusive evidence that the linen of the Shroud of Turin is mediaeval.”
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1989Natur.337..611D
In the case you know something that these experts in their fields do not…please share.
The pieces they took were supposedly very likely skewed by a fire at a church in the middle ages, throwing off the carbon dating. I’m not a “believer” but they do have a very logical counter-argument to the shroud carbon dating debacle -and it was that, read the whole story from both perspectives. Cheers.
I’ve heard about these, “black holes” for years now but I don’t know wither they really exist or not., I’ve never seen one.
Interesting terminology: ‘Universe’s exit door’.
God’s Word describes the “bottomless pit” as the place where those deemed unfit for His Kingdom are placed. “Cast into outer darkness where their weeping and gnashing of teeth will be.”
“Bottomless pit”….”Outer darkness”. These are aptly described by the evident reality of “black holes”….literally “knots” in the fabric of the universe, tied by the Hand of God Himself.
Take a good hard look at the folly of empires throughout history….what student of history does NOT know that man has always ended up dominating his fellow man to his own injury time and time again? Look at the Wisdom contained in God’s Word. Evolutionists have long ridiculed God’s Word as inaccurate and full of myths. Let’s take one of the first ones. God caused Adam to sleep and took a rib and used it to make Eve. If it is a myth, then what a stroke of luck that those making up such fantasy, would choose the only bone in the human body that grows back every time it is carefully removed by human surgeons the world over for some time now. After creating all lower life forms on the planet, it was said: “Let us make a man in our own image”. Compare this with the time line of man in his infant dalliances with similar projects. One has only to perform a cursory net search to see the progression of man’s efforts at creating autonomous creatures. He started with the basest forms and progressed to the point of creating rudimentary AI beings in his own image. Such a progression that mimicks, if in an infantile way, that laid down in God’s Word eons ago….is not by chance, but was inevitable. Cowardly humans prefer not to answer to One higher than themselves and ignore the myriad Truths in God’s Word because they have grown to love the lie, and the father of it. I find it repugnant and rapaciously wrong that man should deny His Creator, yet pontificate his tragic level of hubris in all directions the moment he comes closer to imitating even the simplest of God’s Creations. Even at this time, the science halls are rife with triumphant cries here and there every time nano science produces even the simplest of nano electric motors. Such crude attempts which humbly wither in comparison to the vastly superior Flagellar Motor, whose amazing electric motors drive propellers by means of stators, rotors, magnets, bushings, universal joints etc. at RPMs as high as 1,800 per second. Man, by his own unanalyzed admission, is effectively admitting that he rejoices at being able to even crudely copy that which he deems to have been a blind, dumb, accident. Arrogantly, stupidly, proclaiming that the sum is infinitely less than it’s parts!
Fact is, any serious and honest student of history can see that God’s Word has foretold the story of man accurately to the letter, clearly delineating who would be who on the world stage at this late hour, and what their beliefs, ideals, and technological capabilities would be. Also proclaiming, again, accurate in every detail, what would be taking place in the heavens and to the earth at this time.
http://www.missiontoisrael.org/gods-covenant-people/tableofcontents.php
http://www.missiontoisrael.org/ishmael,edom,israel.php
http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/ciencia/ciencia_earthchanges31.htm
http://www.divulgence.net/Sun%20angle.html
http://www.nbclosangeles.com/weather/stories/Downtown-Los-Angeles-Heat-Weather-103883779.html
http://axischange.wordpress.com/2007/08/09/earth%E2%80%99s-axis-has-changed-%E2%80%BA-create-new-post-%E2%80%94-wordpress/
http://www.isuma.tv/lo/en/inuit-knowledge-and-climate-change-project/earth-has-shifted
http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/
http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100827/full/news.2010.437.html
http://www.isuma.tv/hi/en/inuit-knowledge-and-climate-change/tilted-earth-has-changed-everything
http://www.zetatalk.com/index/orbits.htm
http://nfo.edu/limits.jpg
http://i48.tinypic.com/10qbh9v.jpg
http://i50.tinypic.com/29krwar.jpg
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/07/hightides/
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/11/071122-tremors-tides.html
http://www.zetatalk.com/index/earth243.htm
http://www.gpb.org/news/2009/07/27/scientists-dont-know-whats-causing-freak-tides
http://www.hindu.com/thehindu/holnus/000200907241023.htm
Google – monster waves cruise
http://www.biblebelievers.org.au/joebrandt.htm
Read Luke 21:25-28, Revelation 16:8, and get an idea of the progression of events that has taken place, just in the last few years, then read Isaiah 24:20…
“The earth reels like a drunkard, it sways like a hut in the wind; so heavy upon it is the guilt of its rebellion that it falls–never to rise again.”
Like it or not, believe it or not, Live it or not…..Love it or not….the Truth is the greatest currency man has been privleged to spend. And God’s Truth is never wasted for it never returns to Him without result.
Love, Truth, Courage. These three are One, for not one of them survives very long without the other. Our God is all Three, and so Much more.
Time is short indeed. Get to know your God:
http://www.kingdombiblestudies.org/2hands/2hands1.htm
If you feelf far from Him, who do you think has moved?
Blessings in Yahshua, Jesus Christ
To be honest, I don’t believe a word of what these folks are saying, irrespective of the number of home-made “computer models” and excitingly-coloured graphics they provide in support of their fantasies.. Multiply the acronyms all you like, but at its heart, this is all based on fraud. Einstein is quoted as if he were the ultimate arbiter of reality, instead of a monumental fraud who never discovered a single fact in his life, apart from how to give life to a simpleton and a nonentity, and how to get his first wife to do his maths for him. He then divorced her after committing adultery with a younger model, but gave her the money from the prize in recognition of her work. This great man continued to work in low-key positions despite his colossal intellect. Something a bit fishy here, maybe? None of his wonderful discoveries give a single credit to the people who really did the work. Even The Big One, e=mc2, was discovered by JJ Thomson. Albert Einstein was the creation of a Jewish-owned media, neither more nor less. He was also a rabid Zionist to boot. Hence his utility to the aforementioned manipulators of reality.
But let’s look at the idea of Black Holes. They were dreamed up by Mr Steven Hawking, probably following on from the ingestion of some particularly-potent pharmaceutical, to try and explain how it is that gravity, which is a very weak force, and one which decays exponentially with distance, is able to hold galaxies together, eg, the cartwheel variant, of which type the Milky Way is one. This is why they tell us that these BH’s are always at the centre of galaxies.
What has unfortunately escaped the attention of these incredibly clever and profusely-credentialled individuals, is that there is a force called electromagnetism which is much more complex and capable than mere gravity. EM, for example, can repel as well as attract. This would be a useful attribute if you see so-called BH’s ejecting material from within them, when gravity is only able to attract things. Does it not seem odd to you that a BH swallows everything, including light, but periodically and inexplicably decides to reverse this propensity? EM decays according to the inverse of distance, gravity as the inverse square of distance. So increase the separation between two objects by a factor of a thousand, and EM is now almost a million times more powerful than gravity, and perfectly capable of holding them together without the introduction of a monstrous and grotesque chimaera called a BH.
I know it is difficult and psychologically challenging when mummy first decides that you are too old to continue to use that dummy any more. You scream and you turn blue and the veins in your eyes bulge out, and you repeatedly throw the accursed brightly-coloured plastic rattle which she is trying to get you to accept, out of your pram and onto the floor, again and again. But it is a part of growing up to be one of the Big Boys. We all have to do it eventually. That time has now come round again.
If you read the Electric Universe website, you will either be totally captivated and convinced, or you will retreat still further into an unsustainable nightmare full of black holes, neutron stars, and event horizons.
And no-one will hear you scream.
Agree with you! Einstein was a moron, who couldn’t tie up his shoes laces, that why he was wearing slippers most of the time!