We live in a strange world, and as Neil Armstrong once said, there are "great ideas undiscovered, breakthroughs available to those who can remove one of the truth’s protective layers."
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A team modeling the behavior of black holes has concluded that the masses of the universe’s densest objects are quantized, similar to how electrons orbiting atoms can only have specific energies. Furthermore, just as particles can exist in multiple places at the same time (a phenomenon known as superposition), the authors of a new paper claim black holes can have two masses, each of which is a probability. Don’t worry if you’re having trouble grasping these concepts; even the authors of a paper admit it wasn’t what they expected.
"We all know e=mc2," Dr Magdalena Zych of the University of Queensland told IFLScience. "If we look at how atoms are formed from elementary particles summing the mass of the nucleons does not give the total mass of the atom. The atom’s mass also includes some binding energy, and that energy is quantized." This means the mass of the atom cannot be any value because there are only certain amounts the binding energy can be.
Because macroscopic objects are made up of atoms, their masses are also limited. "For macroscopic objects like us the difference is so tiny it is irrelevant," Zych said, but that may not be the case for black holes. The impossible masses, in particular, may be quite important during their formation and when they evaporate due to Hawking Radiation.
The team arrived at their conclusion by considering the behavior of a particle outside of a black hole and how it would interact with the black hole’s gravitational force without breaking any known laws. However, it is a long way to the nearest black hole to actually conduct a test.
The fact that certain black hole masses may be disallowed may be something non-physicists don’t find too hard to swallow, but the other aspect to this work is something else. "Imagine you’re both broad and tall, as well as short and skinny at the same time – it’s a situation which is intuitively confusing since we’re anchored in the world of traditional physics," said first author PhD student Joshua Foo in a statement. Yet if the team is right, it’s true for black holes, just as Schrödinger’s cat can be simultaneously alive and dead.
"The universe is revealing to us that it’s always more strange, mysterious and fascinating than most of us could have ever imagined," Zych said.
What the team doesn’t know yet, according to Zych, is whether superpositions involve masses that are so similar to each other that they make no difference outside of idealized conditions, or if large differences are possible.
Zych acknowledged the work is just mathematical modeling at this stage and will be hard to test. "The next step is to look into the implications for black holes we are studying," Zych said, whether those be relatively nearby, or the supermassive black holes at the heart of other galaxies.
If the research holds up to scrutiny, it could affect the search for quantum gravity, which aims to bring together the two great theories of the twentieth century, General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics. "If so, any model of quantum gravity would have a very tight restriction," Zych told, "Particularly in the final stages of evaporation. It’s one of the most mind-bending projects."
The findings were published in Physical Review Letters.
These star clusters are seemingly defying the laws of physics.
Astronomers are puzzled by the strange behavior of certain crooked star clusters, which appear to defy gravity’s conventional understanding.
Massive star clusters are typically bound together in spirals at the center of galaxies. Some of these clusters are classified as open star clusters, which are formed in a relatively short period of time when stars ignite in a massive cloud of gas.
During this process, loose stars accumulate in a pair of "tidal tails," one of which is being pulled behind, while the other moves ahead.
"According to Newton’s laws of gravity, it’s a matter of chance in which of the tails a lost star ends up," Jan Pflamm-Altenburg of the University of Bonn in Germany, co-author of a new paper published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, in a statement. "So both tails should contain about the same number of stars."
However, some of their recent findings appear to defy conventional physics.
"However, in our work we were able to prove for the first time that this is not true," Pflamm-Altenburg added. "In the clusters we studied, the front tail always contains significantly more stars nearby to the cluster than the rear tail."
Matter of fact, their new findings are much more consistent with a different theory known as "Modified Newtonian Dynamics" (MOND).
"Put simply, according to MOND, stars can leave a cluster through two different doors," Pavel Kroupa, Pflamm-Altenburg’s colleague at the University of Bonn and lead author, explained in the statement. "One leads to the rear tidal tail, the other to the front."
"However, the first is much narrower than the second — so it’s less likely that a star will leave the cluster through it," he added. "Newton’s theory of gravity, on the other hand, predicts that both doors should be the same width."
Taking MOND into account, the researchers’ simulations could explain a lot. For one thing, they imply that open star clusters live for much shorter periods of time than Newton’s laws of physics predict.
"This explains a mystery that has been known for a long time," Kroupa explained. "Namely, star clusters in nearby galaxies seem to be disappearing faster than they should."
However, not everyone agrees that Newton’s laws should be replaced with MOND, which has the potential to shake the foundations of physics.
"It’s somewhat promising, but it does not provide completely definitive evidence for MOND," University of Saint Andrews research fellow Indranil Banik told New Scientist. "This asymmetry does make more sense in MOND, but in any individual cluster there could be other effects that are causing it — it’s a bit unlikely that would happen in all of them, though."
The researchers are now attempting to refine their picture even further by improving the accuracy of their simulations, which could either support their MOND theory — or conclude that Newton was correct the first time around.
Black holes are usually considered to be enormous, aggressive, and extremely destructive structures. However, according to recent research, they are just as capable of producing stars as they are of consuming them.
Astronomers have discovered a black hole "giving birth" to stars at the center of a nearby dwarf galaxy — and the stellar newborns are held together by a massive "umbilical cord" of gas and dust.
The supermassive black hole was seen spewing a 500-light-year-long jet of ionized gas from its center at around 1 million mph (1.6 million km/h), contributing to a "firestorm" of new star formation in a nearby stellar nursery.
the discovery, made possible by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, is the first time that black holes have given strong indications that they stimulate star formation in very small galaxies, raising the question of what role black holes play.
The remarkable finding was described in a study published in the journal Nature.
"From the beginning, I knew something unusual and special was happening in Henize 2-10, and now Hubble has provided a very clear picture of the connection between the black hole and a neighboring star-forming region located 230 light-years from the black hole," study co-author Amy Reines, an astrophysicist at Montana State University, said in a statement. "Hubble’s amazing resolution clearly shows a corkscrew-like pattern in the velocities of the gas, which we can fit to the model of a precessing, or wobbling, outflow from a black hole."
stretching out from the black hole and across space to a bright stellar nursery. Supermassive black holes, which are millions to billions of times the size of stellar-mass black holes, have previously been observed emitting cosmic plumes, but astronomers originally thought that these jets hindered rather than helped star formation in dwarf galaxies.
"At only 30 million light-years away, Henize 2-10 is close enough that Hubble was able to capture both images and spectroscopic evidence of a black hole outflow very clearly, lead author Zachary Schutte, a graduate student at Montana State University, said in the statement. "The additional surprise was that, rather than suppressing star formation, the outflow was triggering the birth of new stars."
that spew from them by sucking in material from nearby gas clouds or stars and slingshotting it back into space as blazing plasma traveling near the speed of light. If heated sufficiently, the gas clouds that collide with the jet will become ideal nurseries for future stars.
However, getting to that Goldilocks zone is critical; according to NASA, if the jets heat up the gas clouds too much, they may lose their ability to cool back down in the way needed for star formation. But with the gentle, less-massive outflow from the black hole in Henize 2-10 created ideal gas conditions for star formation.
has remained relatively small over time, the researchers believe that studying it in greater detail will help them understand the smaller origins of larger supermassive black holes in the universe, as well as the processes that caused them to balloon to such massive scales. Furthermore, the team’s high-resolution method for detecting the black hole’s dim signature can now be used to find others like it.
"The era of the first black holes is not something that we have been able to see, so it really has become the big question: Where did they come from?" Reines said. "Dwarf galaxies may retain some memory of the black hole seeding scenario that has otherwise been lost to time and space."
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