black hole Archives

October 4, 2016October 5, 2016 by Fraser Cain

What Happens When Black Holes Collide?

The sign of a truly great scientific theory is by the outcomes it predicts when you run experiments or perform observations. And one of the greatest theories ever proposed was the concept of Relativity, described by Albert Einstein in the beginning of the 20th century.

In addition to helping us understand that light is the ultimate speed limit of the Universe, Einstein described gravity itself as a warping of spacetime.

He did more than just provide a bunch of elaborate new explanations for the Universe, he proposed a series of tests that could be done to find out if his theories were correct.

One test, for example, completely explained why Mercury’s orbit didn’t match the predictions made by Newton. Other predictions could be tested with the scientific instruments of the day, like measuring time dilation with fast moving clocks.

Since gravity is actually a distortion of spacetime, Einstein predicted that massive objects moving through spacetime should generate ripples, like waves moving through the ocean.

The more massive the object, the more it distorts spacetime. Credit: LIGO/T. Pyle

Just by walking around, you leave a wake of gravitational waves that compress and expand space around you. However, these waves are incredibly tiny. Only the most energetic events in the entire Universe can produce waves we can detect.

It took over 100 years to finally be proven true, the direct detection of gravitational waves. In February, 2016, physicists with the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory, or LIGO announced the collision of two massive black holes more than a billion light-years away.

Any size of black hole can collide. Plain old stellar mass black holes or supermassive black holes. Same process, just on a completely different scale.

Colliding black holes. Credit: LIGO/A. Simonnet

Let’s start with the stellar mass black holes. These, of course, form when a star with many times the mass of our Sun dies in a supernova. Just like regular stars, these massive stars can be in binary systems.

Imagine a stellar nebula where a pair of binary stars form. But unlike the Sun, each of these are monsters with many times the mass of the Sun, putting out thousands of times as much energy. The two stars will orbit one another for just a few million years, and then one will detonate as a supernova. Now you’ll have a massive star orbiting a black hole. And then the second star explodes, and now you have two black holes orbiting around each other.

As the black holes zip around one another, they radiate gravitational waves which causes their orbit to decay. This is kind of mind-bending, actually. The black holes convert their momentum into gravitational waves.

As their angular momentum decreases, they spiral inward until they actually collide. What should be one of the most energetic explosions in the known Universe is completely dark and silent, because nothing can escape a black hole. No radiation, no light, no particles, no screams, nothing. And if you mash two black holes together, you just get a more massive black hole.

The gravitational waves ripple out from this momentous collision like waves through the ocean, and it’s detectable across more than a billion light-years.

Arial view of LIGO Livingston. (Image credit: The LIGO Scientific Collaboration). — Arial view of LIGO Livingston. Credit: The LIGO Scientific Collaboration

This is exactly what happened earlier this year with the announcement from LIGO. This sensitive instrument detected the gravitational waves generated when two black holes with 30 solar masses collided about 1.3 billion light-years away.

This wasn’t a one-time event either, they detected another collision with two other stellar mass black holes.

Regular stellar mass black holes aren’t the only ones that can collide. Supermassive black holes can collide too.

From what we can tell, there’s a supermassive black hole at the heart of pretty much every galaxy in the Universe. The one in the Milky Way is more than 4.1 million times the mass of the Sun, and the one at the heart of Andromeda is thought to be 110 to 230 million times the mass of the Sun.

In a few billion years, the Milky Way and Andromeda are going to collide, and begin the process of merging together. Unless the Milky Way’s black hole gets kicked off into deep space, the two black holes are going to end up orbiting one another.

Just with the stellar mass black holes, they’re going to radiate away angular momentum in the form of gravitational waves, and spiral closer and closer together. Some point, in the distant future, the two black holes will merge into an even more supermassive black hole.

View of Milkdromeda from Earth "shortly" after the merger, around 3.85-3.9 billion years from now Credit: NASA, ESA, Z. Levay and R. van der Marel (STScI), T. Hallas, and A. Mellinger — View of Milkdromeda from Earth “shortly” after the merger, around 3.85-3.9 billion years from now. Credit: NASA, ESA, Z. Levay and R. van der Marel (STScI), T. Hallas, and A. Mellinger

The Milky Way and Andromeda will merge into Milkdromeda, and over the future billions of years, will continue to gather up new galaxies, extract their black holes and mashing them into the collective.

Black holes can absolutely collide. Einstein predicted the gravitational waves this would generate, and now LIGO has observed them for the first time. As better tools are developed, we should learn more and more about these extreme events.

September 15, 2016October 5, 2016 by Matt Williams

Have We Really Just Seen The Birth Of A Black Hole?

This artist's drawing shows a stellar black hole as it pulls matter from a blue star beside it. Could the stellar black hole's cousin, the primordial black hole, account for the dark matter in our Universe? Credits: NASA/CXC/M.Weiss

For almost half a century, scientists have subscribed to the theory that when a star comes to the end of its life-cycle, it will undergo a gravitational collapse. At this point, assuming enough mass is present, this collapse will trigger the formation of a black hole. Knowing when and how a black hole will form has long been something astronomers have sought out.

And why not? Being able to witness the formation of black hole would not only be an amazing event, it would also lead to a treasure trove of scientific discoveries. And according to a recent study by a team of researchers from Ohio State University in Columbus, we may have finally done just that.

The research team was led by Christopher Kochanek, a Professor of Astronomy and an Eminent Scholar at Ohio State. Using images taken by the Large Binocular Telescope (LBT) and Hubble Space Telescope (HST), he and his colleagues conducted a series of observations of a red supergiant star named N6946-BH1.

*Artist’s impression of the star in its multi-million year long and previously unobservable phase as a large, red supergiant. Credit: CAASTRO / Mats Björklund (Magipics)*

To break the formation process of black holes down, according to our current understanding of the life cycles of stars, a black hole forms after a very high-mass star experiences a supernova. This begins when the star has exhausted its supply of fuel and then undergoes a sudden loss of mass, where the outer shell of the star is shed, leaving behind a remnant neutron star.

This is then followed by electrons reattaching themselves to hydrogen ions that have been cast off, which causes a bright flareup to occur. When the hydrogen fusing stops, the stellar remnant begins to cool and fade; and eventually the rest of the material condenses to form a black hole.

However, in recent years, several astronomers have speculated that in some cases, stars will experience a failed supernova. In this scenario, a very high-mass star ends its life cycle by turning into a black hole without the usual massive burst of energy happening beforehand.

As the Ohio team noted in their study – titled “The search for failed supernovae with the Large Binocular Telescope: confirmation of a disappearing star” – this may be what happened to N6946-BH1, a red supergiant that has 25 times the mass of our Sun located 20 million light-years from Earth.

Artistic representation of the material around the supernova 1987A. Credit: ESO/L. Calçada — *Artistic representation of the material around the supernova 1987A.* *Credit: ESO/L.*

Using information obtained with the LBT, the team noted that N6946-BH1 showed some interesting changes in its luminosity between 2009 and 2015 – when two separates observations were made. In the 2009 images, N6946-BH1 appears as a bright, isolated star. This was consistent with archival data taken by the HST back in 2007.

However, data obtained by the LBT in 2015 showed that the star was no longer apparent in the visible wavelength, which was also confirmed by Hubble data from the same year. LBT data also showed that for several months during 2009, the star experienced a brief but intense flare-up, where it became a million times brighter than our Sun, and then steadily faded away.

They also consulted data from the Palomar Transit Factory (PTF) survey for comparison, as well as observations made by Ron Arbour (a British amateur astronomer and supernova-hunter). In both cases, the observations showed evidence of a flare during a brief period in 2009 followed by a steady fade.

In the end, this information was all consistent with the failed supernovae-black hole model. As Prof. Kochanek, the lead author of the group’s paper – – told Universe Today via email:

“In the failed supernova/black hole formation picture of this event, the transient is driven by the failed supernova. The star we see before the event is a red supergiant — so you have a compact core (size of ~earth) out the hydrogen burning shell, and then a huge, puffy extended envelope of mostly hydrogen that might extend out to the scale of Jupiter’s orbit. This envelope is very weakly bound to the star. When the core of the star collapses, the gravitational mass drops by a few tenths of the mass of the sun because of the energy carried away by neutrinos. This drop in the gravity of the star is enough to send a weak shock wave through the puffy envelope that sends it drifting away. This produces a cool, low-luminosity (compared to a supernova, about a million times the luminosity of the sun) transient that lasts about a year and is powered by the energy of recombination. All the atoms in the puffy envelope were ionized — electrons not bound to atoms — as the ejected envelope expands and cools, the electrons all become bound to the atoms again, which releases the energy to power the transient. What we see in the data is consistent with this picture.”

*The Large Binocular Telescope, showing the two imaging mirrors. Credit: NASA*

Naturally, the team considered all available possibilities to explain the sudden “disappearance” of the star. This included the possibility that the star was shrouded in so much dust that its optical/UV light was being absorbed and re-emitted. But as they found, this did not accord with their observations.

“The gist is that no models using dust to hide the star really work, so it would seem that whatever is there now has to be much less luminous then that pre-existing star.” Kochanek explained. “Within the context of the failed supernova model, the residual light is consistent with the late time decay of emission from material accreting onto the newly formed black hole.”

Naturally, further observations will be needed before we can know whether or not this was the case. This would most likely involve IR and X-ray missions, such as the Spitzer Space Telescope and the Chandra X-ray Observatory, or one of he many next-generation space telescopes to be deployed in the coming years.

In addition, Kochanek and his colleagues hope to continue monitoring the possible black hole using the LBT, and by re-visiting the object with the HST in about a year from now. “If it is true, we should continue to see the object fade away with time,” he said.

The James Webb Space Telescope. Image Credit: NASA/JPL — *Future missions, like the James Webb Space Telescope, will be able to observe possible failed supernovae/blackholes to confirm their existence. Credit: NASA/JPL*

Needless to say, if true, this discovery would be an unprecedented event in the history of astronomy. And the news has certainly garnered its share of excitement from the scientific community. As Avi Loeb – a professor of astronomy at Harvard University – expressed to Universe Today via email:

“The announcement on the potential discovery of a star that collapsed to make a black hole is very interesting. If true, it will be the first direct view of the delivery room of a black hole. The picture is somewhat messy (like any delivery room), with uncertainties about the properties of the baby that was delivered. The way to confirm that a black hole was born is to detect X-rays.

“We know that stellar-mass black holes exist, most recently thanks to the discovery of gravitational waves from their coalescence by the LIGO team. Almost eighty years ago Robert Oppenheimer and collaborators predicted that massive stars may collapse to black holes. Now we might have the first direct evidence that the process actually happens in nature.

But of course, we must remind ourselves that given its distance, what we could be witnessing with N6946-BH1 happened 20 million years ago. So from the perspective of this potential black hole, its formation is old news. But to us, it could be one of the most groundbreaking observations in the history of astronomy.

Much like space and time, significance is relative to the observer!

Further Reading: arXiv

September 2, 2016February 22, 2017 by Fraser Cain

How Cold Are Black Holes?

Today we’re going to have the most surreal conversation. I’m going to struggle to explain it, and you’re going to struggle to understand it. And only Stephen Hawking is going to really, truly, understand what’s actually going on.

But that’s fine, I’m sure he appreciates our feeble attempts to wrap our brains around this mind bending concept.

All right? Let’s get to it. Black holes again. But this time, we’re going to figure out their temperature.

The very idea that a black hole could have a temperature strains the imagination. I mean, how can something that absorbs all the matter and energy that falls into it have a temperature? When you feel the warmth of a toasty fireplace, you’re really feeling the infrared photons radiating from the fire and surrounding metal or stone.

And black holes absorb all the energy falling into them. There is absolutely no infrared radiation coming from a black hole. No gamma radiation, no radio waves. Nothing gets out.

As with most galaxies, a supermassive black hole lies at the heart of NGC 5548. Credit: ESA/Hubble and NASA. Acknowledgement: Davide de Martin

Now, supermassive black holes can shine with the energy of billions of stars, when they become quasars. When they’re actively feeding on stars and clouds of gas and dust. This material piles up into an accretion disk around the black hole with such density that it acts like the core of a star, undergoing nuclear fusion.

But that’s not the kind of temperature we’re talking about. We’re talking about the temperature of the black hole’s event horizon, when it’s not absorbing any material at all.

The temperature of black holes is connected to this whole concept of Hawking Radiation. The idea that over vast periods of time, black holes will generate virtual particles right at the edge of their event horizons. The most common kind of particles are photons, aka light, aka heat.

Normally these virtual particles are able to recombine and disappear in a puff of annihilation as quickly as they appear. But when a pair of these virtual particles appear right at the event horizon, one half of the pair drops into the black hole, while the other is free to escape into the Universe.

From your perspective as an outside observer, you see these particles escaping from the black hole. You see photons, and therefore, you can measure the temperature of the black hole.

PIA18919: How Black Hole Winds Blow (Artist's Concept) — Artist’s concept of the black hole at the center of the Pinwheel Galaxy. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

The temperature of the black hole is inversely proportional to the mass of the black hole and the size of the event horizon. Think of it this way. Imagine the curved surface of a black hole’s event horizon. There are many paths that a photon could try to take to get away from the event horizon, and the vast majority of those are paths that take it back down into the black hole’s gravity well.

But for a few rare paths, when the photon is traveling perfectly perpendicular to the event horizon, then the photon has a chance to escape. The larger the event horizon, the less paths there are that a photon could take.

Since energy is being released into the Universe at the black hole’s event horizon, but energy can neither be created or destroyed, the black hole itself provides the mass that supplies the energy to release these photons.

The black hole evaporates.

The most massive black holes in the Universe, the supermassive black holes with millions of times the math of the Sun will have a temperature of 1.4 x 10^-14 Kelvin. That’s low. Almost absolute zero, but not quite.

Artist's impression of a feeding stellar-mass black hole. Credit: NASA, ESA, Martin Kornmesser (ESA/Hubble) — Artist’s impression of a feeding stellar-mass black hole. Credit: NASA, ESA, Martin Kornmesser (ESA/Hubble)

A solar mass black hole might have a temperature of only .0.00000006 Kelvin. We’re getting warmer.

Since these temperatures are much lower than the background temperature of the Universe – about 2.7 Kelvin, all the existing black holes will have an overall gain of mass. They’re absorbing energy from the Cosmic Background Radiation faster than they’re evaporating, and will for an incomprehensible amount of time into the future.

Until the background temperature of the Universe goes below the temperature of these black holes, they won’t even start evaporating.

A black hole with the mass of the Earth is still too cold.

Only a black hole with about the mass of the Moon is warm enough to be evaporating faster than it’s absorbing energy from the Universe.

As they get less massive, they get even hotter. A black hole with the mass of the asteroid Ceres would be 122 Kelvin. Still freezing, but getting warmer.

A black hole with half the mass of Vesta would blaze at more than 1,200 Kelvin. Now we’re cooking!

Less massive, higher temperatures.

When black holes have lost most of their mass, they release the final material in a tremendous blast of energy, which should be visible to our telescopes.

Artist's conception of the event horizon of a black hole. Credit: Victor de Schwanberg/Science Photo Library — Artist’s conception of the event horizon of a black hole. Credit: Victor de Schwanberg/Science Photo Library

Some astronomers are actively searching the night sky for blasts from black holes which were formed shortly after the Big Bang, when the Universe was hot and dense enough that black holes could just form.

It took them billions of years of evaporation to get to the point that they’re starting to explode now.

This is just conjecture, though, no explosions have ever been linked to primordial black holes so far.

It’s pretty crazy to think that an object that absorbs all energy that falls into it can also emit energy. Well, that’s the Universe for you. Thanks for helping us figure it out Dr. Hawking.

August 13, 2016February 22, 2017 by Fraser Cain

How Close Can Moons Orbit?

The Moon is great and all, but I wish it was closer. Close enough that I could see all kinds of detail on its surface without a telescope or a pair of binoculars. Close enough that I could just reach up and grab enough cheese for a lifetime of grilled cheese sandwiches.

Sure, there would be all kinds of horrible problems with having the Moon that much closer. Intense tides, a total lack of good dark nights for stargazing, and something else… Oh right, the total destruction of life on Earth. On second thought the Moon can stay right where it is, thank you very much.

The Earth’s Moon is located an average distance of 384,400 kilometers away. I say average because the Moon actually follows an elliptical orbit. At its closest point, it’s only 362,600 km, and at its furthest point, it’s 405,400 kilometers.

Still, that’s so far that it takes light a little over a second to reach the Moon, traveling almost 300,000 km/s. The Moon is far.

But what if the Moon was much closer? How close could it get and still be the Moon?

Many of the features on the moon are named as oceans. Credit: NASA — The Moon isn’t actually getting closer. It just looks that way because it’s on your computer screen. Credit: NASA

Once again, I need to remind you that this is purely theoretical. The Moon isn’t getting closer to us, in fact, it’s getting further. The Moon is slowly drifting away from us at a distance of almost 4 centimeters per year.

Let’s go back to the beginning, when the young Earth collided with a Mars-sized planet billions of years ago. This catastrophic encounter completely resurfaced planet Earth, and kicked up a massive amount of debris into orbit. Well, a Moon’s worth of debris, which collected together by mutual gravity into the roughly spherical Moon we recognize today.

Shortly after its formation, the Moon was much closer, and the Earth was spinning more rapidly. A day on Earth was only 6 hours long, and the Moon took just 17 days to orbit the Earth.

The Earth’s gravity stopped the Moon’s relative rotation, and the Moon’s gravity has been slowing the Earth’s rotation. To maintain the overall angular momentum of the system, the Moon has been drifting away to compensate.

This conservation of momentum is very important because it works both ways. As long as a moon takes longer than a day to orbit its planet, you’re going to see this same effect. The planet’s rotation slows, and the moon drifts further to compensate.

But if you have a scenario where the moon orbits faster than the planet rotates, you have the exact opposite situation. The moon makes the planet rotate more quickly, and it drifts closer to compensate. This can’t end well.

Once you get close enough, gravity becomes a harsh mistress.

Reaching the Roche limit can ruin your day. Credit: Hazmat2. Original Image Credit: Theresa Knott. CC-SA 3.0

There’s a point in all gravitational interactions called the Roche Limit. This is the point at which an object held together by gravity (like the Moon), gets close enough to another celestial body that it gets torn apart.

The exact point depends on the mass, size and density of the two objects. For example, the Roche Limit between the Earth and the Moon is about 9,500 kilometers, assuming the Moon is a solid ball. In other words, if the Moon gets within 9,500 kilometers or so, of the Earth, the gravity of the Earth overwhelms the gravity holding the Moon together.

The Moon would be torn apart, and turned into a ring. And then the pieces of the ring would continue to orbit the Earth until they all came crashing down. When that happened, it would be a series of very bad days for anyone living on Earth.

Get too close to the sun and a comet could be torn apart. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

If an average comet got within about 18,000 km of Earth, it would get torn to pieces. While the Sun can, and does, tear apart comets from about 1.3 million km away.

This sounds purely theoretical, but this is actually going to happen over at Mars. Its largest moon Phobos orbits more quickly than a Martian day, which means that it’s drifting closer and closer to the planet. In a few million years, it’ll cross the Roche Limit, tear into a ring, and then all the pieces of the former Phobos will crash down onto Mars. We did a whole article on this.

Phobos, the larger of Mars' two moons, with the Stickney crater seen on the right side. Credit: HiRISE, MRO, LPL (U. Arizona), NASA — Phobos will eventually break apart from reaching the Roche limit, which will leave Deimos as Mars’ only moon. Credit: HiRISE, MRO, LPL (U. Arizona), NASA

Now you might be wondering, wait a second. I’m a separate object from the Earth, why don’t I get torn apart since I’m definitely within the Earth’s Roche Limit.

You do have gravity holding you together, but it’s insignificant compared to the chemical bonds holding you together. This is why physicists consider gravity to actually be a pretty weak force compared to all the other forces of the Universe.

You’d need to go somewhere with really intense gravity, like a black hole, for the Roche Limit to overcome the forces holding you together.

So that’s it. Bring the Moon within 9,500 kilometers or so and it would no longer be a Moon. It would be torn apart into a ring, a Halo ring, if you will, capable of wiping out all life on a planet infected by the flood. All the moons we see in the Solar System are are least at the Roche Limit or beyond, otherwise they would have broken up long ago… and probably did.

July 25, 2016February 22, 2017 by Fraser Cain

What are Quark Stars?

We’ve covered the full range of exotic star-type objects in the Universe. Like Pokemon Go, we’ve collected them all. Okay fine, I’m still looking for a Tauros, and so I’ll continue to wander the streets, like a zombie staring at his phone.

Now, according to my attorney, I’ve fulfilled the requirements for shamelessly jumping on a viral bandwagon by mentioning Pokemon Go and loosely connecting it to whatever completely unrelated topic I was working on.

Any further Pokemon Go references would just be shameless attempts to coopt traffic to my channel, and I’m better than that.

It was pretty convenient, though, and it was easy enough to edit out the references to Quark on Deep Space 9 and replace them with Pokemon Go. Of course, there is a new Star Trek movie out, so maybe I miscalculated.

Anyway, now that we got that out of the way. Back to rare and exotic stellar objects.

The white dwarf G29-38 (NASA) — The white dwarf G29-38. Credit: NASA

There are the white dwarfs, the remnants of stars like our Sun which have passed through the main sequence phase, and now they’re cooling down.

There are the neutron stars and pulsars formed in a moment when stars much more massive than our Sun die in a supernova explosion. Their gravity and density is so great that all the protons and electrons from all the atoms are mashed together. A single teaspoon of neutron star weighs 10 million tons.

And there are the black holes. These form from even more massive supernova explosions, and the gravity and density is so strong they overcome the forces holding atoms themselves together.

White dwarfs, neutron stars and black holes. These were all theorized by physicists, and have all been discovered by observational astronomers. We know they’re out there.

Is that it? Is that all the exotic forms that stars can take? That we know of, yes, however, there are a few even more exotic objects which are still just theoretical. These are the quark stars. But what are they?

Artist concept of a neutron star. Credit: NASA

Let’s go back to the concept of a neutron star. According to the theories, neutron stars have such intense gravity they crush protons and electrons together into neutrons. The whole star is made of neutrons, inside and out. If you add more mass to the neutron star, you cross this line where it’s too much mass to hold even the neutrons together, and the whole thing collapses into a black hole.

A star like our Sun has layers. The outer convective zone, then the radiative zone, and then the core down in the center, where all the fusion takes place.

Could a neutron star have layers? What’s at the core of the neutron star, compared to the surface?

The idea is that a quark star is an intermediate stage in between neutron stars and black holes. It has too much mass at its core for the neutrons to hold their atomness. But not enough to fully collapse into a black hole.

The difference between a neutron star and a quark star (Chandra) — The difference between a neutron star and a quark star. Credit: Chandra

In these objects, the underlying quarks that form the neutrons are further compressed. “Up” and “down” quarks are squeezed together into “strange” quarks. Since it’s made up of “strange” quarks, physicists call this “strange matter”. Neutron stars are plenty strange, so don’t give it any additional emotional weight just because it’s called strange matter. If they happened to merge into “charm” quarks, then it would be called “charm matter”, and I’d be making Alyssa Milano references.

And like I said, these are still theoretical, but there is some evidence that they might be out there. Astronomers have discovered a class of supernova that give off about 100 times the energy of a regular supernova explosion. Although they could just be mega supernovae, there’s another intriguing possibility.

They might be heavy, unstable neutron stars that exploded a second time, perhaps feeding from a binary companion star. As they hit some limit, they converting from a regular neutron star to one made of strange quarks.

But if quark stars are real, they’re very small. While a regular neutron star is 25 km across, a quark star would only be 16 km across, and this is right at the edge of becoming a black hole.

A neutron star (~25km across) next to a quark star (~16km across). Original Image Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center — A neutron star (~25km across) next to a quark star (~16km across). Original Image Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center

If quark stars do exist, they probably don’t last long. It’s an intermediate step between a neutron star, and the final black hole configuration. A last gasp of a star as its event horizon forms.

It’s intriguing to think there are other exotic objects out there, formed as matter is compressed into tighter and tighter configurations, as the different limits of physics are reached and then crossed. Astronomers will keep searching for quark stars, and I’ll let you know if they find them.

June 9, 2016February 22, 2017 by Fraser Cain

Are There Antimatter Galaxies?

One of the biggest mysteries in astronomy is the question, where did all the antimatter go? Shortly after the Big Bang, there were almost equal amounts of matter and antimatter. I say almost, because there was a tiny bit more matter, really. And after the matter and antimatter crashed into each other and annihilated, we were left with all the matter we see in the Universe.

You, and everything you know is just a mathematical remainder, left over from the great division of the Universe’s first day.

We did a whole article on this mystery, so I won’t get into it too deeply.

But is it possible that the antimatter didn’t actually go anywhere? That it’s all still there in the Universe, floating in galaxies of antimatter, made up of antimatter stars, surrounded by antimatter planets, filled with antimatter aliens?

Aliens who are friendly and wonderful in every way, except if we hugged, we’d annihilate and detonate with the energy of gigatons of TNT. It’s sort of tragic, really.

If those antimatter galaxies are out there, could we detect them and communicate with those aliens?

First, a quick recap on antimatter.

Antimatter is just like matter in almost every way. Atoms have same atomic mass and the exact same properties, it’s just that all the charges are reversed. Antielectrons have a positive charge, antihydrogen is made up of an antiproton and a positron (instead of a proton and an electron).

It turns out this reversal of charge causes regular matter and antimatter to annihilate when they make contact, converting all their mass into pure energy when they come together.

We can make antimatter in the laboratory with particle accelerators, and there are natural sources of the stuff. For example, when a neutron star or black hole consumes a star, it can spew out particles of antimatter.

In fact, astronomers have detected vast clouds of antimatter in our own Milky Way, generated largely by black holes and neutron stars grinding up their binary companions.

Wyoming Milky Way set. Credit and copyright: Randy Halverson.

But our galaxy is mostly made up of regular matter. This antimatter is detectable because it’s constantly crashing into the gas, dust, planets and stars that make up the Milky Way. This stuff can’t get very far without hitting anything and detonating.

Now, back to the original question, could you have an entire galaxy made up of antimatter? In theory, yes, it would behave just like a regular galaxy. As long as there wasn’t any matter to interact with.

And that’s the problem. If these galaxies were out there, we’d see them interacting with the regular matter surrounding them. They would be blasting out radiation from all the annihilations from all the regular matter gas, dust, stars and planets wandering into an antimatter minefield.

Astronomers don’t see this as far as they look, just the regular, quiet and calm matter out to the edge of the observable Universe.

That doesn’t make it completely impossible, though, there could be galaxies of antimatter as long as they’re completely cut off from regular matter.

But even those would be detectable by the supernova explosions within them. A normally matter supernova generates fast moving neutrinos, while an antimatter supernova would generate a different collection of particles. This would be a dead giveaway.

There’s one open question about antimatter that might make this a deeper mystery. Scientists think that antimatter, like regular matter, has regular gravity. Matter and antimatter galaxies would be attracted to each other, encouraging annihilation.

But scientists don’t actually know this definitively yet. It’s possible that antimatter has antigravity. An atom of antihydrogen might actually fall upwards, accelerating away from the center of the Earth.

alpha_image_resized_for_web — The ALPHA experiment, one of five experiments that are studying antimatter at CERN Credit: Maximilien Brice/CERN

Physicists at CERN have been generating antimatter particles, and trying to detect if they’re falling downward or up.

If that was the case, then antimatter galaxies might be able to repel particles of regular matter, preventing the annihilation, and the detection.

If you were hoping there are antimatter lurking out there, hoarding all that precious future energy, I’m sorry to say, but astronomers have looked and they haven’t found it. Just like the socks in your dryer, we may never discover where it all went.

April 10, 2016April 20, 2016 by Matt Williams

Can We Now Predict When A Neutron Star Will Give Birth To A Black Hole?

A black hole is the final form a massive star collapses to. The light (and spacetime itself) is warped around the black hole's event horizon due to extreme gravitational effects. This is as accurate as we can be to visualizing an actual black hole as it was generated with a code that implemented General Relativity accurately. Credit and Copyright: Paramount Pictures/Warner Bros. Mathematical Model used to create the image developed by Dr. Kip Thorne

A neutron star is perhaps one of the most awe-inspiring and mysterious things in the Universe. Composed almost entirely of neutrons with no net electrical charge, they are the final phase in the life-cycle of a giant star, born of the fiery explosions known as supernovae. They are also the densest known objects in the universe, a fact which often results in them becoming a black hole if they undergo a change in mass.

For some time, astronomers have been confounded by this process, never knowing where or when a neutron star might make this final transformation. But thanks to a recent study by a team of researchers from Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany, it may now be possible to determine the absolute maximum mass that is required for a neutron star to collapse, giving birth to a new black hole.

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March 13, 2016March 18, 2016 by Bob King

18 Billion Solar Mass Black Hole Rotates At 1/3 Speed Of Light

Black-hole-powered galaxies called blazars are the most common sources detected by NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope. They are sources of neutrinos and cosmic rays. Credits: M. Weiss/CfA

Way up in the constellation Cancer there’s a 14th magnitude speck of light you can claim in a 10-inch or larger telescope. If you saw it, you might sniff at something so insignificant, yet it represents the final farewell of chewed up stars as their remains whirl down the throat of an 18 billion solar mass black hole, one of the most massive known in the universe.

Astronomers know the object as OJ 287, a quasar that lies 3.5 billion light years from Earth. Quasars or quasi-stellar objects light up the centers of many remote galaxies. If we could pull up for a closer look, we’d see a brilliant, flattened accretion disk composed of heated star-stuff spinning about the central black hole at extreme speeds.

An illustration of the binary black hole system in OJ287. The predictions of the model are verified by observations. Credit: University of Turku — An illustration of the binary black hole system, OJ 287, showing the massive black hole surrounded by an accretion disk. A second, smaller black hole is believed to orbit the larger. When it intersects the larger’s disk coming and going, astronomers see a pair of bright flares. The predictions of the model are verified by observations. Credit: University of Turku

As matter gets sucked down the hole, jets of hot plasma and energetic light shoot out perpendicular to the disk. And if we’re so privileged that one of those jet happens to point directly at us, we call the quasar a “blazar”. Variability of the light streaming from the heart of a blazar is so constant, the object practically flickers.

Long exposures made with the Hubble Space Telescope showing brilliant quasars flaring in the hearts of six distant galaxies. Credit: NASA/ESA

A recent observational campaign involving more than two dozen optical telescopes and NASA’s space based SWIFT X-ray telescope allowed a team of astronomers to measure very accurately the rotational rate the black hole powering OJ 287 at one third the maximum spin rate — about 56,000 miles per second (90,000 kps) — allowed in General Relativity A careful analysis of these observations show that OJ 287 has produced close-to-periodic optical outbursts at intervals of approximately 12 years dating back to around 1891. A close inspection of newer data sets reveals the presence of double-peaks in these outbursts.

Illustration of a gradually precessing orbit similar to the precessing orbit of the smaller smaller black hole orbiting the larger in OJ 287. Credit: Willow W / Wikipedia

To explain the blazar’s behavior, Prof. Mauri Valtonen of the University of Turku (Finland) and colleagues developed a model that beautifully explains the data if the quasar OJ 287 harbors not one buy two unequal mass black holes — an 18 billion mass one orbited by a smaller black hole.

OJ 287 is visible due to the streaming of matter present in the accretion disk onto the largest black hole. The smaller black hole passes through the larger’s the accretion disk during its orbit, causing the disk material to briefly heat up to very high temperatures. This heated material flows out from both sides of the accretion disk and radiates strongly for weeks, causing the double peak in brightness.

The orbit of the smaller black hole also precesses similar to how Mercury’s orbit precesses. This changes when and where the smaller black hole passes through the accretion disk. After carefully observing eight outbursts of the black hole, the team was able to determine not only the black holes’ masses but also the precession rate of the orbit. Based on Valtonen’s model, the team predicted a flare in late November 2015, and it happened right on schedule.

OJ 287 has been fluctuating around 13.5-140 magnitude lately. You can spot in a 10-inch or larger scope in Cancer not far from the Beehive Cluster. Click the image for a detailed AAVSO finder chart. Diagram: Bob King, source: Stellarium — OJ 287 has been fluctuating around 13.5-140 magnitude lately. You can spot it in a 10-inch or larger scope in Cancer not far from the Beehive Cluster. Click the image for a detailed AAVSO finder chart. Diagram: Bob King, source: Stellarium

The timing of this bright outburst allowed Valtonen and his co-workers to directly measure the rotation rate of the more massive black hole to be nearly 1/3 the speed of light. I’ve checked around and as far as I can tell, this would make it the fastest spinning object we know of in the universe. Getting dizzy yet?

February 16, 2016February 17, 2016 by Jason Major

If You’re Going to Fall Into a Black Hole, Make Sure It’s Rotating

It’s no secret that black holes are objects to be avoided, were you to plot yourself a trip across the galaxy. Get too close to one and you’d find your ship hopelessly caught sliding down a gravitational slippery slope toward an inky black event horizon, beyond which there’s no escape. The closer you got the more gravity would yank at your vessel, increasingly more on the end closest to the black hole than on the farther side until eventually the extreme tidal forces would shear both you and your ship apart. Whatever remained would continue to fall, accelerating and stretching into “spaghettified” strands of ship and crew toward—and across—the event horizon. It’d be the end of the cosmic road, with nothing left of you except perhaps some slowly-dissipating “information” leaking back out into the Universe over the course of millennia in the form of Hawking radiation. Nice knowin’ ya.

That is, of course, if you were foolish enough to approach a non-spinning black hole.* Were it to have a healthy rotation to it there’s a possibility, based on new research, that you and your ship could survive the trip intact.

A team of researchers from Georgia Gwinnett College, UMass Dartmouth, and the University of Maryland have designed new supercomputer models to study the exotic physics of quickly-rotating black holes, a.k.a. Kerr black holes, and what might be found in the mysterious realm beyond the event horizon. What they found was the dynamics of their rapid rotation create a scenario in which a hypothetical spacecraft and crew might avoid gravitational disintegration during approach.

“We developed a first-of-its-kind computer simulation of how physical fields evolve on the approach to the center of a rotating black hole,” said Dr. Lior Burko, associate professor of physics at Georgia Gwinnett College and lead researcher on the study. “It has often been assumed that objects approaching a black hole are crushed by the increasing gravity. However, we found that while gravitational forces increase and become infinite, they do so fast enough that their interaction allows physical objects to stay intact as they move toward the center of the black hole.”

Because the environment around black holes is so intense (and physics inside them doesn’t play by the rules) creating accurate models requires the latest high-tech computing power.

“This has never been done before, although there has been lots of speculation for decades on what actually happens inside a black hole,” said Gaurav Khanna, Associate Physics Professor at UMass Dartmouth, whose Center for Scientific Computing & Visualization Research developed the precision computer modeling necessary for the project.

Artist's representation of a black hole, which may or may not be responsible for preserving information forever due to time dialation. Credit: XMM-Newton, ESA, NASA — *Artist’s representation of a black hole. Credit: XMM-Newton, ESA, NASA*

Like science fiction movies have imagined for decades—from Disney’s The Black Hole to Nolan’s Interstellar—it just might be possible to survive a trip into a black hole, if conditions are right (i.e., you probably still don’t want to find yourself anywhere near one of these.)

Of course, what happens once you’re inside is still anyone’s guess…

The team’s paper “Cauchy-horizon singularity inside perturbed Kerr black holes” was published in the Feb. 9, 2016 edition of Rapid Communication in Physical Review D. You can find the full text here. The research was supported by the National Science Foundation.

Sources: UMass Dartmouth and Georgia Gwinnett College

*A true non-rotating “Schwarzschild” black hole would not, due to angular momentum etc., be readily found in the real world, thus making this research on rotating black holes all the more essential.

February 15, 2016February 23, 2017 by Fraser Cain

Was The Big Bang Just A Black Hole?

Fraser “Asks a Spaceman” Dr. Paul Matt Sutter – why do we call the Big Bang a singularity, when we also call black holes singularities?
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