(ORDO NEWS) — Scientists believed that a black hole swallows objects but never brings them back. A new discovery has refuted this claim, writes China Science Daily. The celestial body threw out the swallowed matter – as if “hiccupped after dinner.”
Many people know that black holes are the most “gluttonous animals” in the Universe. They are constantly absorbing and absorbing, and what gets into them will never return, because the force of attraction of this celestial object is so great that you cannot run away from it.
The speed of light is 300,000 kilometers per second, the highest speed of matter in the world. But even light finds it difficult to escape the gravitational force of a black hole, to say nothing of anything else. However, a recent astronomical observation has broken that belief, startling scientists.
On October 10, the journal Astrophysics published an article stating that many major observatories around the world had observed the center of a black hole inexplicably flare up in a galaxy 665 million light-years from Earth.
However, before that there was no evidence that it was this celestial body that absorbed other objects. The researchers suggested that the black hole itself emitted light, but this contradicts the existing laws of physics, according to which black holes do not absorb matter and do not emit light.
The paper’s lead author is Harvard astrophysicist Yvette Cendes. She reported that in October 2018, scientists watched as a supermassive black hole swallowed a star.
At this time, she emitted an extremely powerful light, which was recorded by observatories.
This event is called AT2018hyz. After that, the black hole was silent for almost three years, but in June 2021, the Very Large Antenna Array (VLA) radio observatory in the US state of New Mexico noticed that it had mysteriously revived.
At some point, the object began to emit a bright light, and a large amount of matter splashed out of it. This greatly surprised astronomers.
At first, Sendes and other scientists thought it was an observational error and hurried to study the event more closely. However, after reading the data obtained from many well-known observatories and space observation satellites, the researchers concluded that the phenomenon was real.
The data showed that the black hole was ejecting a large amount of matter, which was emitted at a speed equal to half the speed of light, while the energy level was quite high.
But the strangest thing was that all observations showed that the black hole did not absorb any new celestial bodies at that time and no large amount of matter fell into its environment or inside it, that is, nothing could stimulate such behavior.
This phenomenon was probably the first time humans have recorded a spontaneous black hole eruption.
According to Einstein’s special theory of relativity, matter cannot escape from the black hole’s event horizon. Only Hawking radiation can emit a small amount of matter. It is so small that it can be completely ignored, so it is generally accepted that black holes themselves do not emit light and do not eject matter.
Black holes are like voracious beasts in Chinese myths. They just devour all the time, but never spit out anything. Therefore, the spontaneous ejection of a black hole surprised scientists.
Sendes compared the release to “afternoon hiccups.” She said: “This event was a complete surprise for us, because no one had seen anything like this before, and according to the existing laws of physics, this is impossible.”
The random outburst of a black hole occurred almost three years after the last absorption of a star. Usually, when it consumes matter, some debris returns to the event horizon under the influence of gravitational perturbations, but this is extremely rare.
Why didn’t the black hole eject matter as soon as it swallowed the star, but did so two years and eight months later, during AT2018hyz?
Some astronomers believe that this phenomenon is due to the energy activity inside the black hole: it is possible that a star that was swallowed up more than two years ago was transformed into a stream of energy, which affected the dynamic balance inside the celestial body.
This caused a kind of resonance and eventually caused the black hole to spit out some of the matter.
But other scientists believe that the functioning of a black hole cannot violate Einstein’s special theory of relativity, and therefore it cannot eject matter from the inside.
It turns out that the reason why the black hole was glowing is because it swallowed too much matter. The fact that astronomers have not seen this means only one thing: the current ability of mankind to observe astronomical phenomena is too low.
For example, a black hole will swallow a large planet. The planet itself does not emit light, so it is difficult to see it. If the mass of the celestial body is large enough, for example, like that of a brown dwarf, then flashes will also be observed when the black hole is attracted by gravity.
The research team does not agree with this statement. Observational data show that no gravitational wave activity and gravitational disturbances have been detected around the black hole.
Therefore, they tend to believe that this is spontaneous radiation and that this is the first time in history when matter has been recorded erupting from a black hole.
Today, scientists cannot understand the reasons for this behavior of a space object, but it will help astrophysicists rethink its characteristics and activity.
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