ambience: black hole sounds
A black hole is a place in space where the gravity is so strong that nothing, not even light, can escape from it. Scientists who are trying to solve the mystery of black holes are facing one big question before they can answer any of the others. How do you even find a black hole to begin with? I’m Jim Metzner, and this is the Pulse of the Planet.
“Black holes can be isolated or they can have companion stars, but if they’re isolated basically you can’t see them. A black hole in a black sky is not very visible.”
Edward Morgan is an astrophysicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
He says scientists believe there are probably millions of black holes in our galaxy, but they’re not always so easy to locate.
“The only way to see a black hole is to actually have matter fall onto the black hole. If you have one normal star like the sun and a black hole, if they’re far enough apart nothing happens. But if they get very close together ,the matter can actually flow from the normal star onto the black hole. Matter will fall down towards the black hole and it will spiral into the black hole much the way water spirals down a drain pipe. When you drop matter onto a black hole it just blasts x-rays and it’d be very, very visible in x-rays. The other way to detect a black hole is through its gravitational influence on nearby stars. The center of our galaxy we believe to have a black hole, because we track the positions of neighboring stars, of stars very close to the center of the galaxy and you can see them being accelerated around some massive object that we don’t see. And we infer therefore that it must be a black hole.”
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