NASA finds an active Black Hole
28 Nov 2015
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is celebrating its discovery of flares of X-rays from a black hole, which goes against the conventional notion that they are compact particles with such huge gravity that even light can't escape.
NASA researchers had, in July, announced the discovery of a black hole that grew much more quickly than its host galaxy. The discovery called into question previous assumptions on the development of galaxies.
NASA had then announced that two of its space telescopes caught a huge burst of X-ray spewing out of a super massive black hole. These flairs appeared to be triggered by the eruption of a charged particle from the black hole.
This confirm the findings of Indian astrophysicist Abhas Mitra who had theorised that the black holes are actually ultra hot balls of fire like our Sun.
Mitra was earlier the head of theoretical astrophysics at the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre in Mumbai and currently Adjunct Professor at the Homi Bhabha National Institute.
''Gas streams pulled inward by gravity get extremely hot by friction and may radiate X-rays,'' he explains his theory on black holes.
Last year even famed British physicist Stephen Hawking contradicted his own theory and said that Black Holes in the real sense do not actually exist.
According to scientists a black hole is formed when a star reaches the end of its life cycle. After a black hole has formed, it can continue to grow by absorbing mass from its surroundings. By absorbing other stars and merging with other black holes, supermassive black holes of millions of solar masses may form.
Since, all the light passing near the Black Holes gets trapped we are unable to see it by naked eyes and it can only be seen through special telescopes. Black Holes are important as without them our galaxies would not exist and it plays a very crucial role in formation of galaxies.
This year NASA tweeted five breathtaking images which is a delight to watch especially for stargazers as they wait for the American Space Agency to release these kinds of images.
The black hole was originally discovered using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, and was then detected in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and by ESA's XMM-Newton and NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory.
Benny Trakhtenbrot, from ETH Zurich's Institute for Astronomy, and an international team of astrophysicists, performed a follow-up observation of this black hole using the 10 meter Keck telescope in Hawaii and were surprised by the results. The data, collected with a new instrument, revealed a giant black hole in an otherwise normal, distant galaxy, called CID-947.
