Astronomers have learned, the speed with which matter falls into the black hole
MOSCOW, 21 sen — news. A material that absorb black holes, moving towards the event horizon is only three times slower than the particles of light that pointed to an unusual “chaotic” nature of their environment. To such conclusion scientists, who published their observations in the journal MNRAS.
Upstairs
“In the center of the galaxy, which we watched live very bright black hole with a mass of 40 million Suns, not suffering from lack of food. We were able to see how she started to eat a lump of matter the size of the Earth,” says Ken pounds (Ken Pounds) from Leicester University (UK).
Cosmic “vacuum cleaner”
Ordinary and supermassive black holes have such strong gravity that it cannot be overcome, not exceeding the speed of light. No objects or radiation cannot escape due to the border effects of the black hole called “event horizon”.
The news
On the other hand, as noted by pounds, nothing prevents scientists to observe what happens with matter approaching the event horizon. The study of its behavior may shed light on the mysteries of the internal structure of black holes, as well as a check of whether scientists today understand the nature of the boundary between the singularity and a “normal” Universe.
Pounds and his colleagues managed to obtain the first information of the kind specified in an unusual manner “lunch” supermassive black holes. They watched the galaxy PG1211+143, is located in the constellation coma Berenices at a distance of about a billion light years from Earth using orbiting x-ray Observatory XMM-Newton.
Four years ago pounds and his team noticed that the emission of PG1211+143 looked very unusual — they were split into several different parts, directed in random directions, and were not collected into a single narrow beam jet, as predicted by the theory.
Trying to understand whether this is so and how such emissions can be formed, astronomers have tried to trace what happens before a black hole will try to “eat” and spit out this matter.
To do this, scientists have long watched how varied the spectrum of a black hole and what “gaps” in it appeared. This allowed them to find traces dense clouds of matter caught in the vicinity of the event horizon in the first days of July 2014.