![]() ![]() “The galaxy we were observing with XMM-Newton has a 40 million solar mass black hole which is very bright and evidently well fed,” Pounds said. The UK’s Dirac supercomputer facility indicated such collision would cancel out the rings’ rotation, allowing gas to fall directly into the black hole. The observation agreed with theoretical work that simulated the formation of misaligned accretion disks and subsequent collisions. They observed strongly red-shifted spectra showing trapped gas, with almost no rotation around the hole, being pulled in at 30 percent the speed of light. As it turns out, misaligned rotation can result in multiple rings of debris, providing a mechanism for gas and even entire stars to be pulled into a super-massive black hole from any direction.Ī team led by Ken Pounds of the University of Leicester used the European Space Agency’s XMM-Newton X-ray telescope to observe the surroundings of a 40-million-solar-mass black hole at the heart of a Seyfert galaxy known as PG1211+143 in the constellation Coma Berenices. ![]() By definition, the black holes cannot be seen, but they can be detected by the radiation emitted as gas and dust are pulled in and heated to enormous temperatures before crossing the point of no return – the event horizon – and vanishing from the knowable universe.īut even supermassive black holes are so compact gas tends to rotate around them instead of falling straight in, forming a spinning accretion disk in which material spirals inward as it is accelerated by the hole’s enormous gravity.Īstronomers assumed the disk would be aligned with the black hole’s rotation axis, but it was not required. University of LeicesterĪ team of UK astronomers has detected gas being sucked into a supermassive black hole at the core of a galaxy one billion light years from Earth that is racing inward at an extraordinary 30 percent the speed of light, or roughly 100,000 kilometres (62,000 miles) per second.īlack holes with millions to billions of times the mass of the Sun are believed to lurk in the cores of most, if not all, major galaxies. The movie below shows how such “chaotic accretion” might evolve over time. “So although I’m keen on space flight, I’m not going to try that.A computer simulation of misaligned accretion disks and rings around a supermassive black hole can collide and tear, allowing gas to fall directly into the central hole at enormous velocities (red arrows). But you couldn’t come back to our Universe.” “The hole would need to be large and if it was rotating it might have a passage to another Universe. “The existence of alternative histories with black holes suggests this might be possible,” Prof Hawking said. Prof Hawking also offered compelling thoughts about where things that fall into a black hole could eventually wind up. For all practical purposes the information is lost,” he said. “This information is emitted in the quantum fluctuations that black holes produce, albeit in chaotic, useless form. “Thus they contain all the information that would otherwise be lost.” “The idea is the super translations are a hologram of the ingoing particles,” he explained. He formulated the idea that information is stored in the form of what are known as super translations. “The information is not stored in the interior of the black hole as one might expect, but in its boundary – the event horizon,” Prof Hawking said. ![]() Not even light can escape them, since their gravitational pull is so infinitely powerful. Instead, it’s permanently encoded in a two-dimensional hologram at the surface of the black hole’s event horizon.Īs we understand them, black holes are regions of space-time where stars, having exhausted their fuel, collapse under their own gravity, creating a bottomless pit that swallows anything approaching too closely. Not even if it gets sucked into a black hole.īut Prof Hawking’s idea is that the information doesn’t make it inside the black hole at all. And according to the laws of quantum mechanics, this information should never entirely disappear, no matter what happens to it. The presentation was made at the Hawking Radiation Conference, which was co-hosted by the Nordita institute and the University of North Carolina.Įverything in our world is encoded with quantum mechanical information. Is it destroyed, as our understanding of general relativity would predict? If so, that would violate the laws of quantum mechanics.Īccording to a new idea proposed yesterday by Prof Hawking at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, black holes don’t actually swallow and destroy physical information. One of the most baffling questions facing a generation of physicists is what happens to the information about the physical state of things that are swallowed up by black holes? Artist’s impression of a black hole and a normal star. ![]()
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