preview

Black Holes Lab

Decent Essays

Black holes are celestial bodies so dense and strong that nothing can escape their pull. The idea of black holes is generally referred to the French mathematician, Pierre Simon Laplace. In 1796, Laplace who was studying the subject of escape velocity; this is the speed that something must be accelerated to in order to prevent being pulled back by the gravity of a larger body. For example, to escape the Earth’s gravitational pull we must accelerate our rockets to over 11 kilometers per second. If the rocket travels any slower then it will fall into a victim of earth gravity. If it travels any faster it will never return. When Laplace worked on this problem he noticed a relationship between the size of the object and its mass. Laplace noticed …show more content…

Over 100 years later, the publication of Einstein’s general theory of relativity in 1915 brought the prediction that gravity could bend light rays. Soon after a German mathematician and astronomer named Karl Schwarzschild took that notation and worked out that for an object of any given mass, there was a specific radius at which light would be unable to escape. This distance has become known as the Schwarzschild radius and the formula he came up with defines the size any object of mass would need to be in order for its escape velocity to equal the speed of light. The concept of the black hole only remained as a theoretical construct. Astronomers had no real use for them because at the time the universe was relatively simple. No one thought black holes existed in nature. In the 1960s everything changed with the launch of an Aerobe rocket with x-ray detectors on board. Designed to look for x-rays from the moon the satellite found not only a faint background glow of x-rays from all over the sky, but also there was also one strong source of x-ray emission in the constellation of Scorpios. It was the first x-ray source ever …show more content…

For a source that was many light years always as Scorpios was, to have the amount of x-ray emissions that was detected implied that it must have been generating huge quantities of x-rays. The simplest explanation for this was if material was heated to extreme temperatures as it was being accelerated by gravity onto a nearby object. If this would be true then the companion object had to be very small and very dense. The next pivotal discovery come with the launch of the Unuru x-ray satellite on December 12th 1970. Its given job was to map the x-ray sky; the satellite found 339 sources. Some where galaxies, some supernova remnants, but most were x-ray binary stars. Here, ordinary stars stream their material onto nearby neutron stars which gets extremely hot as it falls, therefore emitting x-rays. One of these sources however known as Cygnus X1 did not fall into this category. Neutron stars are formed from the collapse of stars less than 3 times the mass of the Sun. From the uhuru satellite the data, it shows that the companion to this star appeared to be live to be 5 to 8 times the mass of the Sun, this object was too large to be a neutron

Get Access