Black Hole

GROUP VI
What Is a Black Hole?
 A black hole is a place in space where gravity
pulls so much that even light can not get out. The
gravity is so strong because matter has been
squeezed into a tiny space. This can happen when
a star is dying.

An artist's drawing a black hole named Cygnus X-1. It formed when a large
star caved in. This black hole pulls matter from blue star beside it.
Credits: NASA/CXC/M.Weiss
How Big Are Black Holes?
 Black holes can be big or small. Scientists
think the smallest black holes are as small as just
one atom. These black holes are very tiny but
have the mass of a large mountain. Mass is the
amount of matter, or "stuff," in an object.

An artist's drawing a black hole named Cygnus X-1. It formed when a large
star caved in. This black hole pulls matter from blue star beside it.
Credits: NASA/CXC/M.Weiss
 KINDS OF BLACK HOLE

STELLAR - Its mass can be up to 20 times more than the mass of the sun. There may be many, many
stellar mass black holes in Earth's galaxy.
 KINDS OF BLACK HOLE
SUPERMASSIVE - hese black holes have masses that are more than 1 million suns together.
Scientists have found proof that every large galaxy contains a supermassive black hole at its
center. The supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy is called
Sagittarius A. It has a mass equal to about 4 million suns and would fit inside a very large
ball that could hold a few million Earths.
How Do Black Holes Form?
 Scientists think the smallest black holes formed when the universe began.

Stellar black holes are made when the center of a very big star falls in upon itself, or
collapses. When this happens, it causes a supernova. A supernova is an exploding star
that blasts part of the star into space.
If Black Holes Are "Black," How Do
Scientists Know They Are There?
 A black hole can not be seen because strong gravity pulls all of the light into the
middle of the black hole. But scientists can see how the strong gravity affects the stars and
gas around the black hole. Scientists can study stars to find out if they are flying around, or
orbiting, a black hole.
 When a black hole and a star are close together, high-energy light is made. This kind
of light can not be seen with human eyes. Scientists use satellites and telescopes in space
to see the high-energy light.
Collapsing Star Gives Birth to a Black Hole

May 26, 2017

 Astronomers have watched as a massive, dying star was likely
reborn as a black hole. It took the combined power of the Large Binocular
Telescope (LBT), and NASA's Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes to go
looking for remnants of the vanquished star, only to find that it
disappeared out of sight.

The star, which was 25 times as massive as our sun, should have
exploded in a very bright supernova. Instead, it fizzled out—and then left
behind a black hole.
 "Massive fails" like this one in a nearby galaxy could explain why
astronomers rarely see supernovae from the most massive stars, said
Christopher Kochanek, professor of astronomy at The Ohio State
University and the Ohio Eminent Scholar in Observational Cosmology.
As many as 30 percent of such stars, it seems, may quietly collapse into
black holes — no supernova required.
"The typical view is that a star can form a black hole only after it
goes supernova," Kochanek explained. "If a star can fall short of a
supernova and still make a black hole, that would help to explain why we
don’t see supernovae from the most massive stars."
 Among the galaxies they've been watching is NGC 6946, a spiral
galaxy 22 million light-years away that is nicknamed the "Fireworks
Galaxy" because supernovae frequently happen there — indeed, SN
2017eaw, discovered on May 14th, is shining near maximum brightness
now. Starting in 2009, one particular star, named N6946-BH1, began to
brighten weakly. By 2015, it appeared to have winked out of existence.
After the LBT survey for failed supernovas turned up the star,
astronomers aimed the Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes to see if it was
still there but merely dimmed. They also used Spitzer to search for any
infrared radiation emanating from the spot. That would have been a sign
that the star was still present, but perhaps just hidden behind a dust cloud.
 All the tests came up negative. The star was no longer there. By a careful process of elimination, the researchers eventually concluded
that the star must have become a black hole.
It's too early in the project to know for sure how often stars experience massive fails, but Scott Adams, a former Ohio State student who
recently earned his doctorate doing this work, was able to make a preliminary estimate.
"N6946-BH1 is the only likely failed supernova that we found in the first seven years of our survey. During this period, six normal
supernovae have occurred within the galaxies we've been monitoring, suggesting that 10 to 30 percent of massive stars die as failed
supernovae," he said.
"This is just the fraction that would explain the very problem that motivated us to start the survey, that is, that there are fewer
observed supernovae than should be occurring if all massive stars die that way."
Astronomers See Distant Eruption as Black Hole Destroys
Star
June 15, 2018
 For the first time, astronomers have directly imaged the formation and expansion of a fast-moving jet of material ejected
when the powerful gravity of a supermassive black hole ripped apart a star that wandered too close to the massive monster.
The scientists tracked the event with radio and infrared telescopes, including the National Science Foundation's Very Long
Baseline Array (VLBA) and NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, in a pair of colliding galaxies called Arp 299. The galaxies are
nearly 150 million light-years from Earth. At the core of one of the galaxies, a black hole 20 million times more massive than the
Sun shredded a star more than twice the Sun's mass, setting off a chain of events that revealed important details of the violent
encounter. The researchers also used observations of Arp 299 made by NASA's Hubble space telescope prior to and after the
appearance of the eruption.
 Only a small number of such stellar deaths, called tidal disruption events, or TDEs, have been detected. Theorists have
suggested that material pulled from the doomed star forms a rotating disk around the black hole, emitting intense X-rays and
visible light, and also launches jets of material outward from the poles of the disk at nearly the speed of light.
Discovery of a jet
The first indication came on January 30, 2005, when
astronomers using the William Herschel Telescope in the
Canary Islands discovered a bright burst of infrared emission
coming from the nucleus of one of the colliding galaxies in
Arp 299. On July 17, 2005, the VLBA revealed a new, distinct
source of radio emission from the same location.
Discovery of a jet
Continued observations with the VLBA, the European
VLBI Network (EVN), and other radio telescopes, carried out
over nearly a decade, showed the source of radio emission
expanding in one direction, just as expected for a jet. The
measured expansion indicated that the material in the jet
moved at an average of one-fourth the speed of light. The
radio waves are not absorbed by the dust, but pass through it.
Discovery of a jet

These observations used multiple radio-telescope

antennas, separated by thousands of miles, to gain the
resolving power, or ability to see fine detail, required to detect
the expansion of an object so distant.
Monster appetite Most galaxies have supermassive black holes,
containing millions to billions of times the mass of the Sun, at
their cores. In a black hole, the mass is so concentrated that its
gravitational pull is so strong that not even light can escape.
When those supermassive black holes are actively drawing in
material from their surroundings, that material forms a
rotating disk around the black hole, and super-fast jets of
particles are launched outward. This is the phenomenon seen
in radio galaxies and quasars.
Monster appetite

Such events may have been more common in the distant

universe, so studying them may help scientists understand the
environment in which galaxies developed billions of years
ago.
Monster appetite The discovery, the scientists said, came as a surprise.
The initial infrared burst was discovered as part of a project
that sought to detect supernova explosions in such colliding
pairs of galaxies. Arp 299 has seen numerous stellar
explosions, and has been dubbed a "supernova factory." This
new object originally was considered to be a supernova
explosion. Only in 2011, six years after discovery, the radio-
emitting portion began to show an elongation. Subsequent
monitoring showed the expansion growing, confirming that
what the scientists are seeing is a jet, not a supernova.
 Black Hole Image Makes History;
NASA Telescopes Coordinated Observations
April 10, 2019
A black hole and its shadow have been captured in an image for the first time, a historic feat
by an international network of radio telescopes called the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT).
EHT is an international collaboration whose support in the U.S. includes the National Science
Foundation.
A black hole is an extremely dense object from which no light can escape. Anything that comes within a black hole’s
“event horizon,” its point of no return, will be consumed, never to re-emerge, because of the black hole’s
unimaginably strong gravity. By its very nature, a black hole cannot be seen, but the hot disk of material that
encircles it shines bright. Against a bright backdrop, such as this disk, a black hole appears to cast a shadow.
The stunning new image shows the shadow of the supermassive black hole in the center of Messier 87 (M87), an
elliptical galaxy some 55 million light-years from Earth. This black hole is 6.5 billion times the mass of the Sun.
Catching its shadow involved eight ground-based radio telescopes around the globe, operating together as if they
were one telescope the size of our entire planet.
 While NASA observations did not directly trace out the historic image, astronomers
used data from NASA’s Chandra and NuSTAR satellites to measure the X-ray brightness
of M87’s jet. Scientists used this information to compare their models of the jet and disk
around the black hole with the EHT observations. Other insights may come as researchers
continue to pore over these data.
Record-breaking Explosion by Black Hole Spotted

Feb. 28, 2020

 Evidence for the biggest explosion seen in the Universe comes
from a combination of X-ray data from Chandra and XMM-Newton, and
the Murchison Widefield Array and Giant Metrewave Telescope, as
shown here. The eruption is generated by a black hole located in the
cluster's central galaxy, which has blasted out jets and carved a large
cavity in the surrounding hot gas. Researchers estimate this explosion
released five times more energy than the previous record holder and
hundreds of thousands of times more than a typical galaxy cluster.
 The biggest explosion seen in the universe has been found. This
record-breaking, gargantuan eruption came from a black hole in a distant
galaxy cluster hundreds of millions of light years away.
 The black hole eruption must have finished because the researchers do
not see any evidence for current jets in the radio data. This shutdown can be
explained by the Chandra data, which show that the densest and coolest gas
seen in X-rays is currently located at a different position from the central
galaxy. If this gas shifted away from the galaxy it will have deprived the
black hole of fuel for its growth, turning off the jets.
 This gas displacement is likely caused by "sloshing" of the gas around
the middle of the cluster, like wine sloshing around in a glass. Usually the
merger of two galaxy clusters triggers such sloshing, but here it could have
been set off by the eruption.
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2017/collapsing-star-gives-birth-to-a-black-hole

https://www.nasa.gov/feature/jpl/Astronomers-See-Distant-Eruption-as-Black-Hole-Destroys-Star

https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/chandra/news/black-hole-image-makes-history

https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/chandra/news/record-breaking-explosion-by-black-hole-spotted.html