home.social

#black_hole — Public Fediverse posts

Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #black_hole, aggregated by home.social.

fetched live
  1. A phase transition of spacetime at the edge of a black hole.

    A phase transition is a special state of an object. For decades, physicists suspected that something similar could happen to spacetime, to the very structure of the universe, organizing itself into a crystalline structure just on the threshold of becoming a black hole.
    If the energy of the infalling shell of particles is adjusted to a critical threshold—the boundary between "collapse into a black hole" and "safe dissipation"—the resulting spacetime doesn't simply remain quiescent. It pulsates, oscillating with a precise, repeating rhythm, with discrete self-similarity, as if spacetime itself were a crystal with a regular lattice structure. Physicists called this state "critical collapse" and almost immediately realized that it had the hallmarks of a phase transition.
    Moreover, the equations describing spacetime near the edge of a black hole are far from simple. The equations of general relativity in four dimensions resist simplification. But what if we increase the number of dimensions? Not to five or forty-two, but straight to infinity. As Christian Ecker of Goethe University Frankfurt notes, in principle, nothing prevents us from writing the equations for any number of dimensions—five, forty-two, or an infinite number. The equations in this limit, surprisingly, reduce to something much more manageable. The four-dimensional problem, reformulated as the limit in an infinite number of dimensions of a more general theory, lends itself to analytical methods that were simply not available before. In this limit, a whole family of exact solutions has been discovered—an infinite catalog of spacetime crystal configurations, each characterized by a single time function encoding the repeating rhythm of the structure.

    journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/

    #science #science_news #physics #self-organization #black_hole #phase_transition #phase_transitions #astronomy #cosmology

  2. A phase transition of spacetime at the edge of a black hole.

    A phase transition is a special state of an object. For decades, physicists suspected that something similar could happen to spacetime, to the very structure of the universe, organizing itself into a crystalline structure just on the threshold of becoming a black hole.
    If the energy of the infalling shell of particles is adjusted to a critical threshold—the boundary between "collapse into a black hole" and "safe dissipation"—the resulting spacetime doesn't simply remain quiescent. It pulsates, oscillating with a precise, repeating rhythm, with discrete self-similarity, as if spacetime itself were a crystal with a regular lattice structure. Physicists called this state "critical collapse" and almost immediately realized that it had the hallmarks of a phase transition.
    Moreover, the equations describing spacetime near the edge of a black hole are far from simple. The equations of general relativity in four dimensions resist simplification. But what if we increase the number of dimensions? Not to five or forty-two, but straight to infinity. As Christian Ecker of Goethe University Frankfurt notes, in principle, nothing prevents us from writing the equations for any number of dimensions—five, forty-two, or an infinite number. The equations in this limit, surprisingly, reduce to something much more manageable. The four-dimensional problem, reformulated as the limit in an infinite number of dimensions of a more general theory, lends itself to analytical methods that were simply not available before. In this limit, a whole family of exact solutions has been discovered—an infinite catalog of spacetime crystal configurations, each characterized by a single time function encoding the repeating rhythm of the structure.

    journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/

    #science #science_news #physics #self-organization #black_hole #phase_transition #phase_transitions #astronomy #cosmology

  3. Have you seen it? They captured an image of a black hole and its accretion disc residing in the heart of the M87 galaxy, 52 million light years away from us. This blows my mind on multiple levels. #ESO #astronomy #M87 #black_hole #science #ALMA #radioastronomy #mindblown

    To understand what you are seeing, you might want to watch Derek's latest Veritasium video: youtu.be/zUyH3XhpLTo