![]() There are still many unknowns, and even the most familiar objects, like Cygnus X-1, can still confound scientists. Read: The Milky Way has giant bubbles at its center Astronomers have even managed to photograph a black hole, in a way: In the picture, taken by a collection of telescopes stationed across the world, the supermassive black hole in the center of a neighboring galaxy has cast its shadow on the glowing material around it. Gravitational waves-ripples in the fabric of space-time-rolling past Earth? They may have been produced by the force of two black holes smashing into each other. A carousel of stars rotating around a seemingly empty spot in space? A black hole might be in there. They find evidence of the invisible objects using indirect methods. Today, astronomers know that black holes are everywhere, in the centers of most galaxies, including our own, and sprinkled throughout. The X-rays that had helped reveal its existence were coming from the hot gas swirling around it. The data in support of this hypothesis accumulated, and by 1990 the scientific community had reached a historic consensus. But at the time, black holes-perplexing points in space where gravity is so strong that nothing can escape from them-were still the stuff of complicated theories of physics, not reality. Something that big should be a star, scientists thought, and yet they couldn’t see it. Telescope observations eventually revealed that Cygnus X-1 was a murky presence near its companion star, and had a surprising amount of mass. Instead they detected a set of mysterious emissions coming from well beyond our solar system, and traced one of them back to the constellation Cygnus. Researchers had launched rockets carrying Geiger counters toward the boundary of space in an attempt to pick up X-rays coming from the moon. Our experience with Cygnus X-1 began a little more recently, in the 1960s, in the skies over New Mexico. Its existence as a black hole began millions of years ago, when that star reached a breaking point, running out of fuel and collapsing. The invisible object was once a blue star itself. The black hole, named Cygnus X-1, resides in a swan-shaped constellation called Cygnus. Read: Stars aren’t supposed to go out like this The accidental discovery is a reminder that astronomers are still trying to understand some of the most basic forces in our galaxy. A familiar black hole showed it still has secrets. On the scale of scientific discoveries, Miller-Jones’s finding is much closer to a huh moment than a eureka moment. Which is particularly strange because, based on what astronomers currently understand about these kinds of objects and the way they form, this black hole probably shouldn’t exist.īlack holes are some of the most mysterious objects in the universe, in our own Milky Way galaxy and many light-years beyond, and they often surprise the researchers trying to understand them. According to their recently published findings, the black hole, the system’s main attraction, is much more massive than they thought. In fact, the black hole is the first ever discovered, after some years of research led to the breathtaking realization that this weird object couldn’t be anything but an invisible pit of inscrutable depths.īut when Miller-Jones and a team of researchers directed their attention to it a few years ago, they noticed something weird. ![]() What the black hole doesn’t swallow, it hurls into space, producing intense jets of radiation."There is a lot going on,” James Miller-Jones, an astrophysicist at Curtin University in Australia, told me.Īstronomers have studied this distant environment, and particularly the black hole, for decades. The stellar particles swirl around the invisible object in a tilt-a-whirl of luminous reds and oranges. A supergiant star, so hot that it glows electric blue, and a black hole spin around each other at extraordinary speeds, orbiting so closely that some of the star’s material is pulled toward the black hole. There’s a spot in space, thousands of light-years from here, that might best be described as a cosmic amusement park.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |