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Black hole: what's inside? Interesting facts and research. Black hole - the most mysterious object in the Universe

A black hole is one of the most mysterious objects in the Universe. Many famous scientists, including Albert Einstein, spoke about the possibility of the existence of black holes. Black holes owe their name to American astrophysicist John Wheeler. There are two types of black holes in the Universe. The first is massive black holes - huge bodies whose mass is millions of times greater than the mass of the Sun. Such objects, as scientists assume, are located in the center of galaxies. At the center of our Galaxy there is also a gigantic Black Hole. Scientists have not yet been able to figure out the reasons for the appearance of such huge cosmic bodies.

Point of view

Modern science underestimates the significance of the concept of “time energy”, introduced into scientific use by the Soviet astrophysicist N.A. Kozyrev.

We refined the idea of ​​the energy of time, as a result of which a new philosophical theory appeared - “ideal materialism”. This theory provides an alternative explanation for the nature and structure of black holes. Black holes in the theory of ideal materialism play a key role, and, in particular, in the processes of origin and balance of time energy. The theory explains why there are supermassive black holes at the centers of almost all galaxies. On the site you will be able to familiarize yourself with this theory, but after appropriate preparation. see site materials).

A region in space and time whose gravitational pull is so strong that even objects moving at the speed of light cannot leave it is called a black hole. The boundary of a black hole is referred to as the “event horizon” concept, and its size is referred to as the gravitational radius. In the simplest case, it is equal to the Schwarzschild radius.

The fact that the existence of black holes is theoretically possible can be proven from some of Einstein's exact equations. The first of them was obtained in 1915 by the same Karl Schwarzschild. It is unknown who was the first to invent this term. We can only say that the very designation of the phenomenon was popularized thanks to John Archibald Wheeler, who first published the lecture “Our Universe: the Known and Unknown,” where it was used. Much earlier, these objects were called “collapsed stars” or “collapsars.”

The question of whether black holes actually exist is related to the real existence of gravity. In modern science, the most realistic theory of gravity is the general theory of relativity, which clearly defines the possibility of the existence of black holes. But, nevertheless, their existence is possible within the framework of other theories, so the data is constantly analyzed and interpreted.

The statement about the existence of real-life black holes should be understood as a confirmation of the existence of dense and massive astronomical objects, which can be interpreted as black holes of the theory of relativity. In addition, stars in the late stages of collapse can be attributed to a similar phenomenon. Modern astrophysicists do not attach importance to the difference between such stars and real black holes.

Many of those who have studied or are still studying astronomy know what is a black hole And where does she come from. But still, for ordinary people who are not particularly interested in this, I will briefly explain everything.

Black hole- this is a certain area in the space of space or even time in it. Only this is not an ordinary area. It has very strong gravity (attraction). Moreover, it is so strong that something cannot get out of a black hole if it gets there! Even the sun's rays cannot avoid falling into a black hole if it passes nearby. Although, know that the sun's rays (light) move at the speed of light - 300,000 km/sec.

Previously, black holes were called differently: collapsars, collapsed stars, frozen stars, and so on. Why? Because black holes appear due to dead stars.

The fact is that when a star exhausts all its energy, it becomes a very hot giant, and eventually it explodes. Its core, with some probability, can shrink very strongly. Moreover, with incredible speed. In some cases, after a star explodes, a black, invisible hole is formed that devours everything in its path. All objects that even move at the speed of light.

A black hole doesn't care what objects it absorbs. These can be either spaceships or the rays of the sun. It doesn't matter how fast the object is moving. The black hole also doesn’t care what the object’s mass is. It can devour everything from cosmic microbes or dust, right up to the stars themselves.

Unfortunately, no one has yet figured out what is happening inside a black hole. Some suggest that an object that falls into a black hole is torn apart with incredible force. Others believe that the exit from a black hole can lead to another, some kind of second universe. Still others believe that (most likely) if you walk from the entrance to the exit of a black hole, it may simply eject you in another part of the universe.

Black hole in space

Black hole- This space object incredible density, possessing absolute gravity, such that any cosmic body and even space and time itself are absorbed by it.

Black holes manage the most evolution of the universe. they are in a central place, but they cannot be seen; their signs can be detected. Although black holes have the ability to destroy, they also help build galaxies.

Some scientists believe that black holes are the gateway to parallel universes. which may well be the case. There is an opinion that black holes have opposites, the so-called white holes . having anti-gravity properties.

Black hole is born inside the largest stars, when they die, gravity destroys them, thereby leading to a powerful explosion supernova.

The existence of black holes was predicted by Karl Schwarzschild

Karl Schwarzschild was the first to use Einstein's general theory of relativity to prove the existence of a “point of no return.” Einstein himself did not think about black holes, although his theory predicts their existence.

Schwarzschild made his proposal in 1915, immediately after Einstein published his general theory of relativity. At that time, the term “Schwarzschild radius” arose - this is a value that shows how much you would have to compress an object for it to become a black hole.

Theoretically, anything can become a black hole if compressed enough. The denser the object, the stronger the gravitational field it creates. For example, the Earth would become a black hole if it had the mass of an object the size of a peanut.

Sources: www.alienguest.ru, cosmos-online.ru, kak-prosto.net, nasha-vselennaya.ru, www.qwrt.ru

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Black holes are perhaps the most mysterious and enigmatic astronomical objects in our Universe; since their discovery, they have attracted the attention of scientists and excite the imagination of science fiction writers. What are black holes and what do they represent? Black holes are extinct stars that, due to their physical characteristics, have such a high density and such powerful gravity that even light cannot escape beyond them.

History of the discovery of black holes

For the first time, the theoretical existence of black holes, long before their actual discovery, was suggested by a certain D. Michel (an English priest from Yorkshire, who is interested in astronomy in his spare time) back in 1783. According to his calculations, if we take ours and compress it (in modern computer language, archive it) to a radius of 3 km, such a large (simply enormous) gravitational force will be formed that even light will not be able to leave it. This is how the concept of a “black hole” appeared, although in fact it is not black at all; in our opinion, the term “dark hole” would be more appropriate, because it is precisely the absence of light that occurs.

Later, in 1918, the great scientist Albert Einstein wrote about the issue of black holes in the context of the theory of relativity. But it was only in 1967, through the efforts of the American astrophysicist John Wheeler, that the concept of black holes finally won a place in academic circles.

Be that as it may, D. Michel, Albert Einstein, and John Wheeler in their works assumed only the theoretical existence of these mysterious celestial objects in outer space, but the real discovery of black holes took place in 1971, it was then that they were first noticed in telescope.

This is what a black hole looks like.

How black holes form in space

As we know from astrophysics, all stars (including our Sun) have some limited supply of fuel. And although the life of a star can last billions of light years, sooner or later this conditional supply of fuel comes to an end, and the star “goes out”. The process of “fading” of a star is accompanied by intense reactions, during which the star undergoes a significant transformation and, depending on its size, can turn into a white dwarf, a neutron star or a black hole. Moreover, the largest stars, with incredibly impressive sizes, usually turn into a black hole - due to the compression of these most incredible sizes, there is a multiple increase in the mass and gravitational force of the newly formed black hole, which turns into a kind of galactic vacuum cleaner - absorbing everything and everyone around it.

A black hole swallows a star.

A small note - our Sun, by galactic standards, is not at all a large star and after its extinction, which will occur in about a few billion years, it most likely will not turn into a black hole.

But let's be honest with you - today, scientists do not yet know all the intricacies of the formation of a black hole; undoubtedly, this is an extremely complex astrophysical process, which in itself can last millions of light years. Although it is possible to advance in this direction could be the discovery and subsequent study of the so-called intermediate black holes, that is, stars in a state of extinction, in which the active process of black hole formation is taking place. By the way, a similar star was discovered by astronomers in 2014 in the arm of a spiral galaxy.

How many black holes are there in the Universe?

According to the theories of modern scientists, there may be up to hundreds of millions of black holes in our Milky Way galaxy. There may be no less of them in our neighboring galaxy, to which there is nothing to fly from our Milky Way - 2.5 million light years.

Black hole theory

Despite the enormous mass (which is hundreds of thousands of times greater than the mass of our Sun) and the incredible strength of gravity, it was not easy to see black holes through a telescope, because they do not emit light at all. Scientists managed to notice the black hole only at the moment of its “meal” - absorption of another star, at this moment characteristic radiation appears, which can already be observed. Thus, the black hole theory has found actual confirmation.

Properties of black holes

The main property of a black hole is its incredible gravitational fields, which do not allow the surrounding space and time to remain in their usual state. Yes, you heard right, time inside a black hole passes many times slower than usual, and if you were there, then when you returned back (if you were so lucky, of course), you would be surprised to notice that centuries have passed on Earth, and you haven’t even grown old made it in time. Although let’s be truthful, if you were inside a black hole, you would hardly survive, since the force of gravity there is such that any material object would simply be torn apart, not even into pieces, into atoms.

But if you were even close to a black hole, within the influence of its gravitational field, you would also have a hard time, since the more you resist its gravity, trying to fly away, the faster you would fall into it. The reason for this seemingly paradox is the gravitational vortex field that all black holes possess.

What if a person falls into a black hole

Evaporation of black holes

English astronomer S. Hawking discovered an interesting fact: black holes also appear to emit evaporation. True, this only applies to holes of relatively small mass. The powerful gravity around them gives birth to pairs of particles and antiparticles, one of the pair is pulled in by the hole, and the second is expelled out. Thus, the black hole emits hard antiparticles and gamma-rays. This evaporation or radiation from a black hole was named after the scientist who discovered it - “Hawking radiation”.

The largest black hole

According to the black hole theory, at the center of almost all galaxies there are huge black holes with masses from several million to several billion solar masses. And relatively recently, scientists discovered the two largest black holes known to date; they are located in two nearby galaxies: NGC 3842 and NGC 4849.

NGC 3842 is the brightest galaxy in the constellation Leo, located 320 million light years away from us. At its center there is a huge black hole weighing 9.7 billion solar masses.

NGC 4849, a galaxy in the Coma cluster, 335 million light-years away, boasts an equally impressive black hole.

The gravitational field of these giant black holes, or in academic terms, their event horizon, is approximately 5 times the distance from the Sun to ! Such a black hole would eat our solar system and not even choke.

The smallest black hole

But in the vast family of black holes there are also very small representatives. Thus, the most dwarf black hole discovered by scientists to date is only 3 times the mass of our Sun. In fact, this is the theoretical minimum required for the formation of a black hole; if that star were slightly smaller, the hole would not have formed.

Black holes are cannibals

Yes, there is such a phenomenon, as we wrote above, black holes are a kind of “galactic vacuum cleaners” that absorb everything around them, including... other black holes. Recently, astronomers discovered that a black hole from one galaxy was being eaten by an even larger black glutton from another galaxy.

  • According to the hypotheses of some scientists, black holes are not only galactic vacuum cleaners that suck everything into themselves, but under certain circumstances they can themselves give birth to new universes.
  • Black holes can evaporate over time. We wrote above that the English scientist Stephen Hawking discovered that black holes have the property of radiation and after some very long period of time, when there is nothing left to absorb around, the black hole will begin to evaporate more, until over time it gives up all its mass into surrounding space. Although this is only an assumption, a hypothesis.
  • Black holes slow down time and bend space. We have already written about time dilation, but space under the conditions of a black hole will also be completely curved.
  • Black holes limit the number of stars in the Universe. Namely, their gravitational fields prevent the cooling of gas clouds in space, from which, as is known, new stars are born.

Black holes on the Discovery Channel, video

And in conclusion, we offer you an interesting scientific documentary about black holes from the Discovery Channel

January 24th, 2013

Of all the hypothetical objects in the Universe predicted by scientific theories, black holes make the most eerie impression. And, although suggestions about their existence began to be made almost a century and a half before Einstein published the general theory of relativity, convincing evidence of the reality of their existence was obtained only recently.

Let's start with how general relativity addresses the question of the nature of gravity. Newton's law of universal gravitation states that a force of mutual attraction acts between any two massive bodies in the Universe. Due to this gravitational attraction, the Earth revolves around the Sun. General relativity forces us to look at the Sun-Earth system differently. According to this theory, in the presence of such a massive celestial body as the Sun, space-time seems to collapse under its weight, and the uniformity of its fabric is disrupted. Imagine an elastic trampoline with a heavy ball (like a bowling ball) on it. The stretched fabric bends under its weight, creating a vacuum around it. In the same way, the Sun pushes space-time around itself.



According to this picture, the Earth simply rolls around the resulting funnel (except that a small ball rolling around a heavy one on a trampoline will inevitably lose speed and spiral closer to the big one). And what we habitually perceive as the force of gravity in our everyday life is also nothing more than a change in the geometry of space-time, and not a force in the Newtonian understanding. Today, a more successful explanation of the nature of gravity than the general theory of relativity gives us has not been invented.

Now imagine what will happen if we, within the framework of the proposed picture, increase and increase the mass of a heavy ball without increasing its physical dimensions? Being absolutely elastic, the funnel will deepen until its upper edges converge somewhere high above the completely heavy ball, and then it will simply cease to exist when viewed from the surface. In the real Universe, having accumulated sufficient mass and density of matter, an object slams a space-time trap around itself, the fabric of space-time closes, and it loses contact with the rest of the Universe, becoming invisible to it. This is how a black hole appears.

Schwarzschild and his contemporaries believed that such strange space objects did not exist in nature. Einstein himself not only adhered to this point of view, but also mistakenly believed that he had succeeded in substantiating his opinion mathematically.

In the 1930s, the young Indian astrophysicist Chandrasekhar proved that a star that has consumed its nuclear fuel sheds its shell and turns into a slowly cooling white dwarf only if its mass is less than 1.4 solar masses. Soon the American Fritz Zwicky realized that supernova explosions produce extremely dense bodies of neutron matter; Later, Lev Landau came to the same conclusion. After Chandrasekhar’s work, it was obvious that only stars with a mass greater than 1.4 solar masses could undergo such an evolution. So a natural question arose: is there an upper limit to the mass of supernovae that neutron stars leave behind?

At the end of the 30s, the future father of the American atomic bomb, Robert Oppenheimer, established that such a limit actually exists and does not exceed several solar masses. It was not possible then to give a more accurate assessment; It is now known that the masses of neutron stars must be in the range of 1.5-3 Ms. But even from the rough calculations of Oppenheimer and his graduate student George Volkow, it followed that the most massive descendants of supernovae do not become neutron stars, but transform into some other state. In 1939, Oppenheimer and Hartland Snyder used an idealized model to prove that a massive collapsing star is contracted to its gravitational radius. From their formulas it actually follows that the star does not stop there, but the co-authors refrained from such a radical conclusion.


09.07.1911 - 13.04.2008

The final answer was found in the second half of the 20th century through the efforts of a whole galaxy of brilliant theoretical physicists, including Soviet ones. It turned out that such a collapse always compresses the star “all the way”, completely destroying its matter. As a result, a singularity arises, a “superconcentrate” of the gravitational field, closed in an infinitesimal volume. For a stationary hole this is a point, for a rotating hole it is a ring. The curvature of space-time and, therefore, the force of gravity near the singularity tends to infinity. At the end of 1967, American physicist John Archibald Wheeler was the first to call such a final stellar collapse a black hole. The new term was loved by physicists and delighted journalists, who spread it around the world (although the French did not like it at first, since the expression trou noir suggested dubious associations).

The most important property of a black hole is that whatever falls into it, it will not come back. This even applies to light, which is why black holes get their name: a body that absorbs all the light falling on it and does not emit any of its own appears completely black. According to general relativity, if an object approaches the center of a black hole at a critical distance—this distance is called the Schwarzschild radius—it can never return. (German astronomer Karl Schwarzschild (1873-1916) in the last years of his life, using the equations of Einstein's general theory of relativity, calculated the gravitational field around a mass of zero volume.) For the mass of the Sun, the Schwarzschild radius is 3 km, that is, to turn our The sun into a black hole, you need to compact its entire mass to the size of a small town!


Inside the Schwarzschild radius, the theory predicts even stranger phenomena: all the matter in a black hole gathers into an infinitesimal point of infinite density at its very center - mathematicians call such an object a singular perturbation. At infinite density, any finite mass of matter, mathematically speaking, occupies zero spatial volume. Naturally, we cannot verify experimentally whether this phenomenon actually occurs inside a black hole, since everything that falls inside the Schwarzschild radius does not return back.

Thus, without being able to “look at” a black hole in the traditional sense of the word “look,” we can nevertheless detect its presence by indirect signs of the influence of its super-powerful and completely unusual gravitational field on the matter around it.

Supermassive black holes

At the center of our Milky Way and other galaxies lies an incredibly massive black hole millions of times heavier than the Sun. These supermassive black holes (as they were named) were discovered from observations of the nature of the movement of interstellar gas near the centers of galaxies. Gases, judging by observations, rotate at a close distance from the supermassive object, and simple calculations using Newton's laws of mechanics show that the object attracting them, with a tiny diameter, has a monstrous mass. Only a black hole can swirl interstellar gas in the center of a galaxy in this way. In fact, astrophysicists have already found dozens of such massive black holes in the centers of galaxies neighboring ours, and they strongly suspect that the center of any galaxy is a black hole.


Black holes with stellar mass

According to our current understanding of stellar evolution, when a star with a mass exceeding approximately 30 solar masses dies in a supernova explosion, its outer shell scatters, and the inner layers rapidly collapse towards the center and form a black hole in the place of the star that has used up its fuel reserves. A black hole of this origin isolated in interstellar space is almost impossible to detect, since it is located in a rarefied vacuum and does not manifest itself in any way in terms of gravitational interactions. However, if such a hole was part of a binary star system (two hot stars orbiting around their center of mass), the black hole would still exert a gravitational influence on its pair star. Astronomers today have more than a dozen candidates for the role of star systems of this kind, although rigorous evidence has not been obtained for any of them.

In a binary system with a black hole in its composition, the matter of the “living” star will inevitably “flow” in the direction of the black hole. And the substance sucked out by the black hole will spin in a spiral when falling into the black hole, disappearing when crossing the Schwarzschild radius. When approaching the fatal boundary, however, the substance sucked into the funnel of the black hole will inevitably become denser and heated due to the increased frequency of collisions between particles absorbed by the hole, until it warms up to the emission energies of waves in the X-ray range of the electromagnetic radiation spectrum. Astronomers can measure the periodicity of changes in the intensity of X-ray radiation of this kind and calculate, by comparing it with other available data, the approximate mass of the object “pulling” matter towards itself. If the mass of an object exceeds the Chandrasekhar limit (1.4 solar masses), this object cannot be a white dwarf, into which our star is destined to degenerate. In most identified observations of such X-ray binary stars, the massive object is a neutron star. However, there have already been more than a dozen cases where the only reasonable explanation is the presence of a black hole in a binary star system.

All other types of black holes are much more speculative and based solely on theoretical research - there is no experimental evidence of their existence at all. First, these are mini black holes with a mass comparable to the mass of a mountain and compressed to the radius of a proton. The idea of ​​their origin at the initial stage of the formation of the Universe immediately after the Big Bang was expressed by English cosmologist Stephen Hawking (see The hidden principle of the irreversibility of time). Hawking suggested that mini-hole explosions could explain the truly mysterious phenomenon of pinpoint gamma-ray bursts in the Universe. Secondly, some theories of elementary particles predict the existence in the Universe - at the micro level - of a real sieve of black holes, which are a kind of foam from the garbage of the universe. The diameter of such micro-holes is supposedly about 10-33 cm - they are billions of times smaller than a proton. At the moment, we do not have any hope of experimentally verifying even the very fact of the existence of such black hole particles, not to mention somehow exploring their properties.


And what will happen to the observer if he suddenly finds himself on the other side of the gravitational radius, otherwise called the event horizon. This is where the most amazing property of black holes begins. It’s not for nothing that when talking about black holes, we always mentioned time, or more precisely space-time. According to Einstein's theory of relativity, the faster a body moves, the greater its mass becomes, but the slower time begins to pass! At low speeds under normal conditions this effect is unnoticeable, but if a body (spaceship) moves at a speed close to the speed of light, then its mass increases and time slows down! When the speed of the body is equal to the speed of light, the mass goes to infinity, and time stops! Strict mathematical formulas speak about this. Let's return to the black hole. Let's imagine a fantastic situation when a starship with astronauts on board approaches the gravitational radius or event horizon. It is clear that the event horizon is so named because we can observe any events (observe anything at all) only up to this boundary. That we are not able to observe beyond this border. However, being inside a ship approaching a black hole, the astronauts will feel the same as before, because... According to their watch, time will run “normally.” The spacecraft will calmly cross the event horizon and move on. But since its speed will be close to the speed of light, the spacecraft will reach the center of the black hole literally in an instant.

And for an external observer, the spacecraft will simply stop at the event horizon, and will remain there almost forever! This is the paradox of the colossal gravity of black holes. The natural question is whether the astronauts who are going into infinity according to the clock of an external observer will remain alive. No. And the point is not at all in enormous gravity, but in tidal forces, which for such a small and massive body change greatly over short distances. With an astronaut's height of 1 m 70 cm, the tidal forces at his head will be much less than at his feet and he will simply be torn apart already at the event horizon. So, we have found out in general terms what black holes are, but so far we have been talking about stellar-mass black holes. Currently, astronomers have discovered supermassive black holes whose mass may be a billion suns! Supermassive black holes are no different in properties from their smaller counterparts. They are only much more massive and, as a rule, are located in the centers of galaxies - the stellar islands of the Universe. At the center of our Galaxy (Milky Way) there is also a supermassive black hole. The colossal mass of such black holes will make it possible to search for them not only in our Galaxy, but also in the centers of distant galaxies located at a distance of millions and billions of light years from the Earth and the Sun. European and American scientists conducted a global search for supermassive black holes, which, according to modern theoretical calculations, should be located at the center of every galaxy.

Modern technologies make it possible to detect the presence of these collapsars in neighboring galaxies, but very few of them have been discovered. This means that either black holes are simply hidden in dense gas and dust clouds in the central part of galaxies, or they are located in more distant corners of the Universe. So, black holes can be detected by the X-ray radiation emitted during the accretion of matter onto them, and to make a census of such sources, satellites with X-ray telescopes on board were launched into near-Earth cosmic space. While searching for sources of X-rays, the Chandra and Rossi space observatories discovered that the sky was filled with background X-ray radiation that was millions of times brighter than visible radiation. Much of this background X-ray emission from the sky must come from black holes. Usually in astronomy there are three types of black holes. The first is black holes of stellar masses (about 10 solar masses). They form from massive stars when they run out of thermonuclear fuel. The second is supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies (millions to billions of solar masses). And finally, the primary black holes, formed at the beginning of the life of the Universe, whose masses are small (on the order of the mass of a large asteroid). Thus, a large range of possible black hole masses remains unfilled. But where are these holes? Filling space with X-rays, they, however, do not want to show their true “face”. But in order to build a clear theory of the connection between background X-ray radiation and black holes, it is necessary to know their number. At the moment, space telescopes have been able to detect only a small number of supermassive black holes, the existence of which can be considered proven. Indirect signs make it possible to increase the number of observed black holes responsible for background radiation to 15%. We have to assume that the remaining supermassive black holes are simply hiding behind a thick layer of dust clouds that transmit only high-energy X-rays or are too far away to be detected by modern observing means.


Supermassive black hole (surroundings) at the center of the M87 galaxy (X-ray image). The ejection (jet) from the event horizon is visible. Image from www.college.ru/astronomy

Finding hidden black holes is one of the main tasks of modern X-ray astronomy. Recent breakthroughs in this area, associated with research using the Chandra and Rossi telescopes, nevertheless cover only the low-energy range of X-ray radiation - approximately 2000-20,000 electron volts (for comparison, the energy of optical radiation is about 2 electrons). volt). Significant amendments to these studies can be made by the European space telescope Integral, which is capable of penetrating into the still insufficiently studied region of X-ray radiation with an energy of 20,000-300,000 electron volts. The importance of studying this type of X-rays is that although the X-ray background of the sky has low energy, multiple peaks (points) of radiation with an energy of about 30,000 electron-volts appear against this background. Scientists are still lifting the lid on what produces these peaks, and Integral is the first telescope sensitive enough to detect such X-ray sources. According to astronomers, high-energy rays generate so-called Compton-thick objects, that is, supermassive black holes shrouded in a dust shell. It is Compton objects that are responsible for X-ray peaks of 30,000 electron volts in the background radiation field.

But, continuing their research, scientists came to the conclusion that Compton objects make up only 10% of the number of black holes that should create high-energy peaks. This is a serious obstacle to further development of the theory. So, the missing X-rays are not supplied by Compton-thick, but by ordinary supermassive black holes? Then what about dust curtains for low-energy X-rays? The answer seems to lie in the fact that many black holes (Compton objects) had enough time to absorb all the gas and dust that enveloped them, but before that they had the opportunity to make themselves known with high-energy X-rays. After consuming all the matter, such black holes were no longer capable of generating X-rays at the event horizon. It becomes clear why these black holes cannot be detected, and it becomes possible to attribute the missing sources of background radiation to them, since although the black hole no longer emits, the radiation it previously created continues to travel through the Universe. However, it is possible that the missing black holes are more hidden than astronomers realize, meaning that just because we don't see them doesn't mean they aren't there. We just don’t have enough observational power yet to see them. Meanwhile, NASA scientists plan to expand the search for hidden black holes even further into the Universe. This is where the underwater part of the iceberg is located, they believe. Over the course of several months, research will be carried out as part of the Swift mission. Penetrating into the deep Universe will reveal hidden black holes, find the missing link to background radiation, and shed light on their activity in the early era of the Universe.

Some black holes are thought to be more active than their quiet neighbors. Active black holes absorb the surrounding matter, and if a “unwary” star flying by gets caught in the flight of gravity, it will certainly be “eaten” in the most barbaric way (torn to shreds). The absorbed material, falling into a black hole, is heated to enormous temperatures and experiences a flare in the gamma, x-ray and ultraviolet range. There is also a supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way, but it is more difficult to study than holes in neighboring or even distant galaxies. This is due to the dense wall of gas and dust that stands in the way of the center of our Galaxy, because the Solar system is located almost at the edge of the galactic disk. Therefore, observations of black hole activity are much more effective in those galaxies whose cores are clearly visible. While observing one of the distant galaxies, located in the constellation Boötes at a distance of 4 billion light years, astronomers were for the first time able to track from the beginning to almost the end the process of absorption of a star by a supermassive black hole. For thousands of years, this giant collapsar rested quietly and peacefully in the center of an unnamed elliptical galaxy, until one of the stars dared to get close enough to it.

The powerful gravity of the black hole tore the star apart. Clots of matter began to fall onto the black hole and, upon reaching the event horizon, flared brightly in the ultraviolet range. These flares were recorded by NASA's new Galaxy Evolution Explorer space telescope, which studies the sky in ultraviolet light. The telescope continues to observe the behavior of the distinguished object today, because The black hole's meal has not yet ended, and the remains of the star continue to fall into the abyss of time and space. Observations of such processes will ultimately help to better understand how black holes evolve together with their host galaxies (or, conversely, galaxies evolve with a parent black hole). Earlier observations indicate that such excesses are not uncommon in the Universe. Scientists have calculated that, on average, a star is consumed by a supermassive black hole in a typical galaxy once every 10,000 years, but since there are a large number of galaxies, star absorption can be observed much more often.


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A black hole is a special region in space. This is a certain accumulation of black matter, capable of drawing into itself and absorbing other objects in space. The phenomenon of black holes is still not. All available data are just theories and assumptions of scientists astronomers.

The name "black hole" was coined by the scientist J.A. Wheeler in 1968 at Princeton University.

There is a theory that black holes are stars, but unusual ones, like neutron ones. A black hole - - because it has a very high luminescence density and sends out absolutely no radiation. Therefore, it is invisible neither in infrared, nor in x-rays, nor in radio rays.

The French astronomer P. Laplace discovered this situation 150 years before black holes. According to his arguments, if it has a density equal to the density of the Earth and a diameter 250 times greater than the diameter of the Sun, then it does not allow light rays to spread throughout the Universe due to its gravity, and therefore remains invisible. Thus, it is assumed that black holes are the most powerful emitting objects in the Universe, but they do not have a solid surface.

Properties of black holes

All supposed properties of black holes are based on the theory of relativity, derived in the 20th century by A. Einstein. Any traditional approach to studying this phenomenon does not provide any convincing explanation for the phenomenon of black holes.

The main property of a black hole is the ability to bend time and space. Any moving object caught in its gravitational field will inevitably be pulled in, because... in this case, a dense gravitational vortex, a kind of funnel, appears around the object. At the same time, the concept of time is transformed. Scientists, by calculation, are still inclined to conclude that black holes are not celestial bodies in the generally accepted sense. These are really some kind of holes, wormholes in time and space, capable of changing and compacting it.

A black hole is a closed region of space into which matter is compressed and from which nothing can escape, not even light.

According to astronomers' calculations, with the powerful gravitational field that exists inside black holes, not a single object can remain unharmed. It will instantly be torn into billions of pieces before it even gets inside. However, this does not exclude the possibility of exchanging particles and information with their help. And if a black hole has a mass at least a billion times greater than the mass of the Sun (supermassive), then it is theoretically possible for objects to move through it without being torn apart by gravity.

Of course, these are only theories, because scientists’ research is still too far from understanding what processes and capabilities black holes hide. It is quite possible that something similar could happen in the future.