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Researchers have long speculated that in the middle of most galaxies, perhaps in all galaxies, there was a super-tight black hole. So even in our own winter street.
The mass of these holes is supposed to represent several millions, even billions of times our own sun. Why is the gravity inside so great that everything is compressed at one point? Around every hole, scientists think that there is a spherical limit, the so-called horizon of events, beyond which nothing, not even light, can escape.
Solid proofs
According to Josefin Larsson, assistant professor in particle and astroparticle physics at KTH Stockholm, evidence of a super-tight black hole in the middle of the winter street has been quite strong.
"You've known for a long time, because you see how the stars move in a particular way around the hole," she says.
A group of European astronomers has now found new evidence of the existence of such a hole. This after observing how gas clouds circulate with a third of the speed of light near the horizon of the hole. According to the researchers, this is the first time that a material is observed at a distance as close to the edge of the black hole.
"Collection of material"
"The results are a stark confirmation of the enormous paradigm of the black hole," said Reinhard Genzel, research director, at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics, in a press release.
The observations were made using the Gravity instrument, which is part of the ESO VLT telescopic telescope in northern Chile.
"Thanks to the incredible sensitivity of Gravity, we were able to observe in real time and unprecedented how the black hole collects materials," said colleague Oliver Pfuhl, also of the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics .
Facts: black holes
A black hole is a point in the space where the gravity is so great that everything is sucked in, even the light.
The hole is surrounded by a horizon called an event, an imaginary ray that starts from the point that forms the hole itself and is directly proportional to the mass of the black hole.
The light and matter that have entered this sphere can never leave the black hole.
An observer located outside this area can therefore never know what is going on inside. Matter and light can cross the horizon of events from the inside to the outside, but not the other way around.
The term "black hole" was coined in 1968 by the American physicist John Wheeler.
Source: NE and others
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