More than a century ago, Albert Einstein theorized that black holes in space would have a region where whatever the black hole wants to suck inside of it surrenders to its doom.
The 1915 theory now has been confirmed by researchers at Oxford University studying a black hole about 10,000 light-years away, according to Science Alert.
The black hole is about 8.5 times the mass of the sun. Its system contains a companion star from which the black hole sucks away material.
Einstein predicted a “plunging region” would surround a black hole so that instead of matter circling it, it goes straight into the black hole, according to U.K.’s Daily Mail.
“This is the first look at how plasma, peeled from the outer edge of a star, undergoes its final fall into the center of a black hole,” said Oxford physicist Andrew Mummery, who led the study.
“Einstein’s theory predicted that this final plunge would exist, but this is the first time we’ve been able to demonstrate it happening,” Mummery said.
“Think of it like a river turning into a waterfall. Hitherto, we have been looking at the river. This is our first sight of the waterfall,” he said.
“We’ve been ignoring this region because we didn’t have the data. But now that we do, we couldn’t explain it any other way,” Mummery said, according to CNN.
Several other Einstein theories have been proved long after his death, including gravitational waves and the universal speed limit.
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“He’s a tough man to bet against at this point,” Mummery said.
“We went out searching for this one specifically — that was always the plan. We’ve argued about whether we’d ever be able to find it for a really long time,” he said. “People said it would be impossible, so confirming it’s there is really exciting.”
The astronomers used two space-based NASA telescopes to collect their data.
“Around these black holes there are big discs of orbiting material [from nearby stars],” Mummery said. “Most of it is stable, which means it can happily flow. It’s like a river, whereas the plunging region is like the edge of a waterfall — all of your support is gone and you’re just crashing headfirst.
Published in #MNRAS: “Continuum emission from within the plunging region of black hole discs”, Mummery et al. This is Fig. 2: for the caption & to read the paper visit https://t.co/fVRa6vQTL1 pic.twitter.com/uh2COWrRGh
— RAS Journals (@RAS_Journals) May 17, 2024
“Most of what you can see is the river, but there’s this tiny region at the very end, which is basically what we found.”
Researchers hope to use their work to learn more about black holes.
“We can really learn about them by studying this region, because it’s right at the edge, so it gives us the most information,” Mummery said.
The research was published May 16 in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
