Black Hole Survival Guide by Janna Levin

Author:Janna Levin [Levin, Janna]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2020-11-10T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 8

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Astrophysics

I need to admit now that the black hole, which is abstractly a place, begins to act very much like a thing in the actual universe. Telescopes operated by satellite or balloon or even laid on the ground can collect light and conclude that black holes are real. So we have to move black holes out of the airy terrain of abstract theory into reality and also move black holes from utterly dark to blindingly bright. You will have to confront jets of matter and antimatter beamed across light-years, even millions of light-years, demolished stars, clumps of material splattering around the hole at nefarious speeds. The darkest astrophysical object in the universe, a veritable hole in space that emits no light, a black hole is transformed ironically into the engine for a light source that outshines any other in the universe.

We have seen quasars, the entire core of an ancient galaxy shining energetically enough for us to see some billions of light-years distant. Supermassive black holes millions or billions of times the mass of the Sun drag galactic driftwood—entire stars, gas and debris, denizens of the astronomical galactic nucleus, the ephemera of the conglomeration’s formation—into a hot mess tumbling down into oblivion. Material is caught in an electromagnetic squall driven by the black hole. The matter renders the invisible visible, tracing the storm like dirt in a tornado. The black hole can spin up the miasma into a luminous jet, which is propelled millions of light-years, a staggering beacon we can see far into the observable universe.

When they were first spotted by terrestrial technology, they were called quasi-stellar radio objects and later quasars when their extragalactic origin became apparent. They looked bright and small, like stars, but were scattered outside of the plane of the galaxy, which was a hint that quasars didn’t actually live here in the Milky Way. They are billions of light-years away, which means they are old, the light traveling all that way for all that time to get here, and rare, which means the universe doesn’t make them as often anymore.

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