Posted on Dec 29, 2020 in Astronomy, Astrophysics, Black Holes, Science
(For the Holiday Season, from Christmas through New Year’s Day. we’ll post 2020’s most viewed articles as ranked by Google Analytics)
Albert Einstein described black holes as strange objects “where God divided by zero.” An international team of astrophysicists has now confirmed that black holes are a distinct “species” from neutron stars –comparable to black holes in mass and size but confined within a hard surface, unlike black holes, an exotic cosmic object without a hard surface predicted by Einstein’s theory of General Relativity that do not have a surface, and are confined within an invisible boundary, called an event horizon, from within which nothing, not even light, can escape.
Hidden in NASA Archival X-ray Data
Definitive proof of the existence of such objects, “a holy grail of modern physics and astronomy,’ reported the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, has been achieved by an international team who revealed by far the strongest steady signature of stellar-mass black holes to date. Using the archival X-ray data from the now decommissioned astronomy satellite Rossi X-Ray Timing Explorer, that probed the extreme environments around white dwarfs, neutron stars, black holes, the team identified the effect of the lack of hard surface on the observed X-ray emission, and thus have found an extremely strong signature of accreting stellar-mass black holes.
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Image credit: Artists impression of ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) discovery of six galaxies lying around a supermassive black hole –quasar SDSS J103027.09+052455.0– the first time such a close grouping has been seen within the first billion years of the Universe.
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