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Black Holes - Part 3: Facts and Recent Black Hole Image


Facts:

  • Black holes do not suck: If you replaced the Sun with a black hole of equal mass, Earth would not get sucked in – it would continue orbiting the black hole as it orbits the Sun, today.
  • Spaghettification: Black holes have this incredible ability to literally stretch you into a long spaghetti-like strand. Appropriately, this phenomenon is called 'spaghettification'.
  • Black holes literally pull the space around them.
  • Black holes are the ultimate energy factories
  • Black holes slow down time.
  • Black holes evaporate over time - Hawking Radiation and in theory Anything can become a black hole
  • For Detailed Reading about these facts, Read Here.
First images of a black hole:


  • Using Even Horizon Telescope which is a series of multiple Telescopes located on the different part of the world such that the combined image captured from them and analyse from a special computer program, generates images like from a telescope of the size of Earth. Schematic of the Event Horizon Telescope

    • Images of Black Holes:  one is of M87 a Supermassive Black Hole situated in the centre of a distant but very brightful Galaxy and second is of our own Galaxy's Supermassive Blackhole Sagittarius A*
    • The gas and dust trapped around Spinning Black Holes in an accretion disc is so compact that it is often heated to billions of degrees even before the matter eventually succumbs to the black hole, making them glow brightly. General relativity also predicts that a black hole will have a “shadow” around it, measuring around three times larger than the event horizon. The shadow is of great interest as its size and shape depend mainly on the mass and – to a lesser extent – on any possible spin of the black hole, thereby revealing its inherent properties.
    • And this image is the proof of that concept. Einstein was right in terms of his General Theory of Relativity. 
    • And one more thing, the image of black hole is just not a normal photograph you are seeing. Due to bending and geometrical distortions of path of the Light around Black Hole, you are actually seeing a complex mixture of Top Bottom Right Left Back and Forth simultaenously. It's like you are seeing a photograph of yours where your front and back are intermingled in a single image. 
    • This discovery and further developments would open up doors of several possibilities like existence of Naked Singularity, Hawking Radiation, Information Paradox, Theory of Everything that will combine Relativity and Quantum Physics, Possibility of White Holes etc.
    At last.... This is not an End. The story has just began. 

    Original Article by Nilesh Mishra

    References: ScienceAlert.com, Physicsworld.
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