Biggest ever seen black hole jets; blasting plasma well beyond their own galaxy
phys.org
phys.org
Yes, in a sense. The point at which the energy bends space-time into a black hole.
The moment right after the big bang. As energy can never be created nor destroyed, all the energy in the universe was practically in one point in space-time a femtosecond after the big bang.
We don't know what's outside the Universe, so we can't say there is nothing, and we can't say there's anything, we don't know what it is expanding into, or if "expansion" even makes sense outside the Universe. If we somehow find out what's outside the known Universe, that will inevitably become part of the known Universe, so we will never know what's outside the Universe.
If you consider the surface of the water as a 2D plane, the bubble expands into a third dimension perpendicular to the others. The bubble's surface is made of the same water as the surface of the pond, and there is no hard boundary between them. The bubble pushes part of the 2D plane into the third dimension, which results in the water having more surface area than the total possible area of the 2D plane.
Area (space) has been created without creating matter or energy. The surface is simply extended into an extra spatial dimension.
The way I like to interpret the big bang is as a higher dimensional structure folding or knotting itself such that a bubble is forced into a 3D space. The bubble expands and thus creates more volume than is possible in the lower-dimensional surface the bubble was formed on. This is my ill-informed interpenetration of M-theory.
Dunno why, but much of mathematics and the universe in general makes much more sense to me when viewed in terms of dimensionality. Our universe is 'just' a 4D slice of a higher dimensional structure, and I find a certain kind of beauty in that. In another life, I'd have been a string theorist
Perhaps gravity evolved.
You also must remember the universe was always infinite (in this model). So for every particle there were particles in every direction from them, ie the universe not a point or point like because points have edges. It was (much much) denser, but still infinite and expanding from all regions.
Has that work developed and found traction among physicists in the 7 years since the article?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black-hole_cosmology
A related theory, rather than being inside a black hole, is that the other side of a black hole is a "white hole". As matter collapses into a black hole, it is emitted from the white hole, creating another universe.
Here's an article from 2010 that expands on the idea, though this is definitely not the first time (or last time) it was discussed, it just happens to be an easily searchable article.
https://www.space.com/8293-universe-born-black-hole-theory.h...
One could then quite reasonably argue that our universe is indeed inside or is itself a black hole.
An average black hole has 50 suns in it, 50 times the mass of our star, that would be a universe without much matter.
>is mass 1-to-1 with the "parent" universe? In this theory, are we inside a black hole containing billions of galaxies worth of matter?
My understanding of the theory is that the proposed parent black hole which our universe is inside would necessarily have to contain all of the mass that we detect in our observable universe. So our universe would be 1-to-1 mass of the parent black hole. The parent universe would be larger (and may contain many black holes, each with a nested universe).
>An average black hole has 50 suns in it, 50 times the mass of our star, that would be a universe without much matter
Indeed! It's interesting to think that perhaps we are on one of the "lowest" layers of the nested multiverse, and perhaps there are only a few dozen (or whatever) layers below us until there is too little mass in that universe to create any more black holes. However, there could be an infinite amount of layers "above" us.
I am curious to where the 50 solar-mass figure comes from, though. Is this excluding super-massive and ultra-massive black holes (which are on the order of 10^6 to 10^11 solar masses)? My intuition says 50 solar-masses is orders of magnitude too low for the average mass of a black hole, but I've never really looked into it
Some might say humans are exotic life that evolved.
The article doesn't quite clarify this point. It mentions the jets shooting from below and above the black holes, but does this mean they're emerging from their interior or being created by the accretion of superheated material that forms in orbit around black holes?
The article simple states this, which seems wrong given the immense gravity of black holes:
>When supermassive black holes become active—in other words, when their immense forces of gravity tug on and heat up surrounding material—they are thought to either emit energy in the form of radiation or jets.
So the holes themselves emit energy jets or their accretion disks do? Sloppy damn phrasing and reporting, and all too common for science subjects.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astrophysical_jet#Rotation_a...
I've seen people say "you're not supposed to mention" downvotes if they happen to you, but when they're plainly stupid?
https://www.caltech.edu/about/news/gargantuan-black-hole-jet...
I think this is likely a misconception too. Hawking radiation does not come from inside a black hole, it comes from the event horizon. A virtual particle/anti-particle pair is created close enough to the event horizon that one of them falls in and the other escapes. This means the origin is outside the hole!
Similar story with jets. They're created by the interactions of matter as it falls towards the black hole (gaining energy), but before it actually falls inside.
In the accretion disk, friction and collision between fragments, molecules, atoms cause things to reach incredible temperatures. The matter gets so incredibly hot that the radiation it emits is actually enough to offset the black hole's gravity and prevents more matter falling in faster. The innermost section of the disk is so ludicrously hot that matter dissociates into subatomic particles and becomes a plasma. This plasma is very energetic and moves very fast and creates a very strong magnetic field. This interacts with the electric field produced by the black hole. This plus the stupendous distortion of spacetime caused by the black hole's rotation causes the magnetic fields to twist up tightly in a vortex about the axis of rotation.
Again, the energies involved are impossibly huge. We're converting matter into energy at something like 95% efficiency. Just through gravity!
Because the plasma is so highly charged, the magnetic vortices are so powerful, and the twist is so tight, it essentially creates a particle accelerator on a galactic scale. Plasma from the accretion disk is sucked into the vortex by the insane magnetic fields. Particles spin round and round in the vortex until they get as close to light speed as is possible. The vortex also confines the jet into a cone, blasting out charged particles with impossible velocities along the axis of rotation.
These jets convert matter into pretty much every kind of energy. Radiation across the entire spectrum, lightspeed particles, magnetic and electric fields. It's really impossible to overstate just how much energy these things throw out. It's just a few degrees shy of a sustained matter/antimatter reaction on stellar scales running for millenia.
These things can extinguish entire galaxies. Not sterilize, extinguish. They can blast away any free gas in a galaxy, immediately and irrevocably halting star and planet formation. Not even just in the host galaxy. Exceptionally powerful quasars can extinguish galaxies lightyears away.
And again, this is only driven by gravity. Nothing else. All of the impossibly huge energies are produced by nothing more than matter falling into a gravity well.
Let’s say you have a black hole. You fire a laser beam straight into it. Just by symmetry, shouldn’t it blueshift on the way in, gain some preposterous amount of energy — enough that it can escape?
The event horizon is the distance where all straight lines lead to the black hole.
You're devilishly close to the Penrose process by which "energy can be extracted from a rotating black hole" [1]. (You can also make them explode [2].)
There _is_ no amount of energy it could gain to escape though. It goes no faster, gets no closer to escape. It just splats into the black hole and we'll never see it again no matter how much energy it started with or gained.
A better answer would be something like a grand unified theory of gravity and the other forces, including quantum effects, which doesn't exist. It's like the holy grail of physics, you'd be the next Einstein if you figure it out.
All paths end at the ~center of the black hole. We don't really know what's there, at the so-called singularity at the center, it may be impossible to know. But it's probably something that light can hit and stop existing, or even if it can't it'll be stuck there in some way or another.
We know that the gravity (warping of spacetime) around a black hole is such that it cannot escape, even at light speed. What happens inside is less sure, but largely moot because none of it can ever affect anything outside of the event horizon ever again.
(Hawking Radiation or something else may make this technically a lie, but it's close enough to the truth to last a few trillion years)
Escape requires a certain critical speed (escape velocity), and light always travels at the speed of light regardless of it's energy, so light's ability to escape a black hole is not energy dependent. At some radius (the event horizon), space itself falls into a black hole faster than the speed of light, and that's sets a hard limit on everything's ability to escape.
Past the event horizon physics get weird. Time becomes finite and ends for all observers at a point in the future called the singularity. Everything falls towards this point, gaining preposterous amounts of energy. "Preposterous" here means infinite energy, and infinite density, really just a whole lot of infinities. Those infinities are problematic, and mean there's probably something non-infinite and uniquely interesting going on in there, but since nothing can escape the event horizon we'll likely never know.
There's a concept for using exactly this idea for interstellar propulsion. You fire a laser around a black hole, it gains energy, then hits you, imparting more kinetic energy than you spent firing the laser.
In essence, you're executing a gravity slingshot with photons.
Has anyone done a galactic engine?
Most quasars emit enough gamma radiation to sterilize all of space within a hundred lightyears or so.