Black Holes: What Have We Learned?
Hawking was originally skeptical of this idea, Banks said. After all, entropy and black holes didn't seem to go together: Black holes were supposed to radiate no energy of any sort — hence the name — and you can't have entropy without radiation. This radiation comes from " virtual particles ," which are constantly popping into and out of existence in the bizarre quantum realm.
Black Holes | Science Mission Directorate
They do so in matter-antimatter pairs, one of which has positive energy and the other negative energy. Ordinarily, these pairs immediately annihilate each other. But if this pair popping occurred at the boundary of a black hole's event horizon, one particle could, theoretically, get gobbled up while the other rocketed off into space. If the negative-energy particle were eaten, the black hole's mass would shrink by a tiny amount, and the object would emit a minuscule bit of radiation.
Hawking worked out this idea in , which is why this hypothesized black-hole light is known as Hawking radiation , or Hawking-Bekenstein radiation. Nobody has spotted such emissions yet, but most physicists believe the emissions exist.
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Therefore, they posit, all black holes will shrink away to nothingness eventually, after there's no matter left for them to scarf down. Though unquestionably a genius, Hawking wasn't always right, and one of his high-profile mistakes concerned black holes. The cosmologist famously posited that the information carried by every particle — data characterizing its spin and mass, for example — hoovered up by a black hole would be lost when the black hole evaporated. Instead, this information must seep back out into the universe via Hawking radiation before the black hole dissipates, most physicists think.
Dave's Universe Year of Pluto. Thursday, July 26, Brown, who published a paper in describing a bright radio source in a small region at the very center of the Milky Way.
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Jansky , a physicist working for Bell Telephone Laboratories, was trying to identify sources of static the telephone company might have to deal with when he stumbled upon the discovery in the early s. Jansky wanted to investigate further to find out why radio waves were coming from interstellar space, but Bell Labs was not interested, and no one else followed up on the discovery for several years.
The asterisk notation was used in atomic physics for atoms that are in a high-energy state, and Brown thought this would be a good analogy for the compact radio source giving energy to its surroundings. Improving telescope technology will let astronomers make out finer details in areas of space surrounding supermassive black holes.
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The Event Horizon Telescope team is expected to reveal the results of these observations soon. This article originally appeared on Discovermagazine. A massive star is forming a companion instead. Cassini catches two of Saturn's moons building a cosmic snowman. Despite concerns, space junk continues to clutter Earth orbit. Juno's mission to Jupiter just hit its halfway point: Here's what we've learned so far.
Black holes aren't completely black
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