Black Hole Understanding & Research

Everyone knows the score with black holes: even if light strays too close, the immense gravity will drag it inside, never to be seen again. They are thought to be created when large stars finally spend all their fuel and collapse. It might come as a surprise, therefore, to find that physicists in the UK have now managed to create an “artificial” black hole in the lab.

Originally, theorists studying black holes focused almost exclusively on applying Einstein’s theory of general relativity, which describes how the gravity of massive objects arises from the curvature of space–time. Then, in 1974, the Cambridge University physicist Stephen Hawking, building on the work of Jacob Bekenstein, showed that quantum mechanics should also be thrown into the mix.

The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) is a large-scale physics experiment and observatory to detect cosmic gravitational waves and to develop gravitational-wave observations as an astronomical tool. The initial LIGO observatories were funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and were conceived, built, and are operated by Caltech and MIT.

The Advanced LIGO Project to enhance the original LIGO detectors began in 2008 and continues to be supported by the NSF, with important contributions from the UK Science and Technology Facilities Council, the Max Planck Society of Germany, and the Australian Research Council. The increased sensitivity of Advanced LIGO made the first detection of gravitational waves possible by the LIGO Scientific Collaboration (LSC) and the Virgo Collaboration with the international participation of scientists from several universities and research institutions. Scientists involved in the project and the analysis of the data for gravitational-wave astronomy are organised by the LSC, which includes more than 1000 scientists worldwide, as well as 44,000 active Einstein@Home users. LIGO is the largest and most ambitious project ever funded by the NSF.

Jeff Steinhauer, and his team at the Technion Atomic Physics Lab, were stymied by a problem facing physicists world-over: Black holes absorb all energy through their event horizon, but what happens then?

Leading physicist Stephen Hawking proposed years ago that photons of energy “leaked” off of the sides of a waning black hole, returning the energy to the earth.

Stephen Hawking on black holes

 

https://www.ligo.caltech.edu/

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