![]() ![]() ![]() “So he developed some new graphical methods for visualizing the trajectory of light rays through the warped space geometry created by the immense gravity of a black hole. “Most physicists work with equations using pen and paper, but because of his disability, Hawking found it easier to visualize things in his mind,” says Alan Lightman, a professor of theoretical physics at MIT and one of Hawking’s long-time friends. Ironically, his growing paralysis may have enabled him to think about black holes in ways other physicists never could. He showed that all black holes eventually evaporate or boil themselves away, expiring in a brilliant burst of energy equivalent to a million 1-megaton hydrogen bombs.Īs Hawking’s mind kept coming up with new ideas, his body was slowly withering - a result of the neurodegenerative disease amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig’s disease, with which he had been diagnosed with at age 21. Hawking went on to show that while large black holes emit radiation as a slow dribble, small ones glow, emitting lots of radiation quickly. “This was a stunning finding that surprised everybody, and we’re still trying to understand its implications.” Artist's concept of two supermassive black holes, similar to those observed by UNM researchers, orbiting one another. ”As Hawking himself put it, ‘black holes ain’t so black,’” Carroll says. The reason, he said, was that black holes shed particles and radiate energy - a phenomenon that came to be known as “Hawking radiation.” And this conclusion meant that rather than being voids producing nothing at all - as physicists had long thought - black holes actually glow. Hawking showed that black holes can actually shrink. Drawing once again from Einstein’s equations, he and Penrose showed that 13.8 billion years ago the universe emerged violently from a single compressed point no bigger than an atom. Hawking also helped confirm the Big Bang theory. In the 1960s, Hawking and fellow British physicist Roger Penrose built on Einstein’s theories to describe the physical characteristics of black holes and showed that when a star collapses it forms an infinitely dense point called a singularity - the birth of a black hole. The term black hole itself wasn’t coined until the 1960s, when scientists began to realize that Einstein’s math actually described real objects - gaping abysses of raw gravitational force so powerful that they suck in dust, gas, and stars and stop light itself from escaping. Most astronomers now believe that black holes lie at the center of most, if not all, galaxies, including our own Milky Way.īut at the time of Hawking’s birth in 1942, black holes were little more than a mathematical quirk - a prediction of Albert Einstein’s 1916 theory of general relativity. ![]() "This happens because the energy released as the black hole eats up stellar material propels the star's debris outwards.The first black hole was discovered in 1971, and we now believe that 100 million or so are sprinkled across the universe. ![]() "When a black hole devours a star, it can launch a powerful blast of material outwards that obstructs our view," Samantha Oates, an astronomer at the University of Birmingham, said in a statement. This process is delightfully called spaghettification, but make no mistake: it's gruesome. The flare occurred just 215 million light-years away from Earth, closer than any other previously observed tidal disruption event.Īstronomers have spotted a rare and radiant pulse of light-the last gasp of a dying star that has been sucked toward the center of a supermassive black hole and shredded into sinuous strings of stardust.The TDE is helping scientists understand more about the gruesome spaghettification process.Astronomers have witnessed a tidal disruption event, where a star whose material was shredded by a nearby supermassive black hole releases an bright flash of light. ![]()
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