SCIENTISTS
have managed to prove that event horizons of a black hole are real and that
matter disappears when it crosses such a point.
Once
matter crosses the event horizon of a black hole it is unable to escape,
according to boffins at the University of Texas (UoT) at Austin.
Due to the
intense gravitational pull of a black hole, not even light can become freed
once it passes the point of no return. Black holes
DO have event horizons which devour EVERYTHING around them. The
revelation goes one step further to proving Albert Einstein’s General Theory of
Relativity.
Astrophysicist
Pawan Kumar, from the university, said: "Our whole point here is to turn
this idea of an event horizon into an experimental science, and find out if
event horizons really do exist or not.
"Our motive is not so much to establish that there is a hard surface, but to push the boundary of knowledge and find concrete evidence that really, there is an event horizon around black holes.”
An artist's
impression of a star impacting against a solid object
Scientists
largely believe that at the heart of most galaxies lies a supermassive black
hole, but one theory that is also recognized is that there might not be a black
hole, but rather a ‘central massive object’ which has somehow managed to avoid
collapsing in on itself to create a singularity – a point of infinite density –
like how black holes are created.
To test this
theory, Mr. Kumar and his team discovered that if a star was to crash into this
central object, it would create intense heat that could be detected, rather
than being sucked into a black hole.
"General
relativity has passed another critical test."
They then
scanned through data from the Pan-STARRS telescope in Hawaii to look for
instances in which this could have happened, but ultimately found none,
essentially disproving the central massive object theory, and proving threw
event horizon one.
Team member Ramesh Narayan from Harvard University said: "Our work implies that some, and perhaps all, black holes have event horizons and that material really does disappear from the observable Universe when pulled into these exotic objects, as we've expected for decades.
"General relativity has passed another critical test."
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