![]() ![]() But why is it important to physicists? As it turns out, the "Wall of Fire" model precludes Einsteinian relativity-but "fixing" it breaks our current understanding of quantum physics. So: obviously this is an important debate for stoned college kids. This latest analysis has been looking more closely into the process of how that radiation is given off, and through a complicated set of calculations, they found that these particles that are coming off the event horizon can create an enormous amount of energy that would cause you to. don't just sit there doing nothing they also have a temperature and they can give off radiation. It's do with something called Hawking Radiation. These calculations carried out by this group in California basically said that when you cross the event horizon, you catch fire. "It's just as unpleasant but it is faster. So you get stretched out, and physicist have a word for this, which, you'll probably understand when I say it: it's called 'spaghettification.' You get ripped apart, and the bits of you that remain get crushed into the center of the black hole." Wall of Fire The force of gravity by that point is so strong that it starts to pull on your feet much, much more strongly than it does your head. Slowly, you start to get closer and closer to the core of the black hole. "You cross the event horizon the theoretical surface around the black hole around which light can't escape You kind of just drift past. Here's how Merali describes the two methods on an accompanying podcast: Spaghettification Until recently, most physicists agreed that black hole death involved being ripped apart (and then crushed)-a process they called, charmingly, "spaghettification." But calculations by string theorist Joseph Polchinski seem to indicate that you'd actually get burned alive in a wall of fire at the black hole's event horizon. In this month's Nature, Zeeya Merali writes about the coolest current debate in physics. ![]() hit a wall of fire and be burned to a crisp in an instant"?Īs it turns out, the answer to that question could change the way we understand the physical universe. ![]() Would you spend weeks floating past its event horizon, before eventually being ripped apart? Or would you-as string theorist Joseph Polchinski recently proposed-soar into a "seething maelstrom of particles. "I've been building theoretical predictions of how these echoes appear to us for a few years," Dr Wilkins said.In terms of "coolest ways to die," it's hard to beat "sucked into a black hole." The question's just: what would that entail, exactly? No one has first-hand experience. It's this phenomenon that allowed Dr Wilkins and his team to detect these X-ray '"echoes" from the other side. Some of these escapee X-rays reflect off the back of the accretion disk and are bent around the black hole by its formidable gravity. This occurs when some X-rays manage to slip past the black hole's massive gravitational pull, only to get sucked back in. The team detected fainter bursts of X-rays that had different wavelengths to the larger ones, indicating that they had bounced off the accretion disk from behind the black hole. Using NASA's Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array and the European Space Agency's XMM-Newton telescope, they saw the expected bright X-ray flashes - but there was also something strange going on. Catching hidden lightĭr Wilkins and his team were studying these X-ray flares spewing out from the supermassive black hole at the centre of a galaxy called I Zwicky 1. "This magnetic field getting tied up and then snapping close to the black hole heats everything around it and produces these high energy electrons, that then go on to produce the X-rays," Dr Wilkins said. The X-ray flares are generated when the black hole's giant magnetic field gets tangled up in its spin. "When matter falls into these black holes, huge amounts of energy is released, evidence of which is observed on scales far beyond the galaxy itself." ![]()
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