Black holes

 

A black hole is an astronomical object with a gravitational pull so strong that nothing, not even light, can escape it. A black hole’s “surface,” called its event horizon, defines the boundary where the velocity needed to escape exceeds the speed of light, which is the speed limit of the cosmos. Matter and radiation fall in, but they can’t get out.

 

Two of the main classes of black holes have been extensively observed out of four classified.

 

Stellar-mass black holes with six to dozens of times the Sun’s mass are spread throughout our Milky Way galaxy, while supermassive monsters weighing 100,000 to billions of solar masses are found in the centers of most big galaxies, ours included.

 

Astronomers had long suspected an in-between class called intermediate-mass black holes, weighing 100 to more than 10,000 solar masses. While a handful of candidates have been identified with indirect evidence, the most convincing example to date came on May 21, 2019, when the National Science Foundation’s Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO), located in Livingston, Louisiana, and Hanford, Washington, detected gravitational waves from a merger of two stellar-mass black holes. This event, dubbed GW190521, resulted in a black hole weighing 142 Suns.

 

A stellar-mass black hole forms when a star with more than 20 solar masses exhausts the nuclear fuel in its core and collapses under its own weight. The collapse triggers a supernova explosion that blows off the star’s outer layers. But if the crushed core contains more than about three times the Sun’s mass, no known force can stop its collapse to a black hole. The origin of supermassive black holes is poorly understood, but we know they exist from the very earliest days of a galaxy’s lifetime.

 

Once born, black holes can grow by accreting matter that falls into them, including gas stripped from neighboring stars and even other black holes.

 

These videos are generated with the help of MidJourney AI.

 

Video credits: @zataylor

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NASA released this sound coming from a Black Hole

The sound waves are rippling out of a supermassive black hole, located 250 million light-years away.

The black hole is at the center of the Perseus cluster of galaxies, and the acoustic waves coming from it have been transposed up 57 and 58 octaves so they're audible to human hearing.

The sound waves were extracted radially, or outwards from the supermassive black hole at the center of the Perseus cluster, and played in an anti-clockwise direction from the center, so that we can hear the sounds in all directions from the supermassive black hole at pitches 144 quadrillion and 288 quadrillion times higher than their original frequency.

The result is an eerie one, like many of the waves recorded from space and transposed into audio frequencies.

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1-2nd video credit: @eawnnn
3rd video credit: Black Hole at the Center of the Perseus Galaxy Cluster (X-ray)