"We do know that galaxies merge and when galaxies merge, they're supermassive black holes or, maybe, weren't supermassive, but pretty massive, and they merge and become supermassive," Gorjian said. One thing that is clear is how supermassive black holes grow - through galaxy mergers or feeding off smaller objects like neutron stars. How supermassive black holes begin forming is still unknown, but it's believed they formed in the first billion years of the universe. "There's no way at the time with the instrumentation that we had to tell that there were supermassive black holes at the centers of most galaxies unless they were active, and active galaxies are only about 10% of the population," he said. Gorjian said this wasn't fully understood until about 25 years ago, thanks to observations from Hubble Space Telescope and ground-based telescopes in Hawaii. Most, if not all, galaxies have a supermassive black hole at the center. "Much more massive stars, when they explode, their cores actually collapse and become a black hole," Gorjian said. When a star is so massive, its core cannot produce enough energy anymore to resist all the mass, and it begins collapsing. Gorjian said most stellar black holes are usually the remnants of exploding stars or supernovae. Stellar black holes start out at three times the mass of the sun and then increase in mass. (Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Scott Noble)ĭifferent types of black holes can be defined by their mass.Īstronomers use our sun's mass as a measurement for huge things in the universe, such as black holes.Īccording to NASA, the mass of a black hole is usually called a "solar mass." One solar mass is defined as the mass of our sun. Models like this may eventually help scientists pinpoint real examples of these powerful binary systems. Gas glows brightly in this computer simulation of supermassive black holes only 40 orbits from merging. That's why stars of the centers of the galaxies aren't just all falling into the black hole at the center. "For something to actually physically fall into it, it needs to lose its sort of momentum. "Unless you are headed directly at it … you're most likely just going to be swung by and just sort of flung out," Gorjian said. While black holes don't eat up everything in their orbit, objects do fall into black holes if the circumstances are right. MEET SAGITTARIUS A*: SCIENTISTS SNAP FIRST PICTURE OF SUPERMASSIVE BLACK HOLE AT CENTER OF MILKY WAY "The idea of black holes sucking everything into them was definitely something I heard as a kid, and that's just wrong," Gorjian said. If you need to know one thing about black holes, Gorjian said, it's that "black holes don't suck." This vast blackness contains all the matter of the black hole. The black hole name comes from the area just beneath the surface known as the event horizon, where nothing can escape – even light. (Image: NASA JPL/Caltech)Ī black hole is a huge amount of mass in a very tiny volume. The black holes were detected by NASA's Nuclear Spectroscopic Array, or NuSTAR, which spotted 32 such black holes in this field and has observed hundreds across the whole sky. The blue dots in this field of galaxies, known as the COSMOS field, show galaxies that contain supermassive black holes emitting high-energy X-rays.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |