Einstein’s theory on matter falling into black holes proven correct

A strange region called a “plunging region” has been discovered for the first time around a black hole. This region, where matter stops orbiting a black hole and instead falls straight down, was predicted by Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity, but had never been observed before. Studying the plunging region can help us understand how black holes form and evolve, and may reveal new information about the fundamental properties of space-time.

When matter gets too close to a black hole, it tears apart and forms an orbiting ring around it called an accretion disk. General relativity predicts that the accretion disk has an inner boundary beyond which nothing can orbit the black hole. Instead, the black hole should fly straight into it, rapidly accelerating to near the speed of light as it falls.

“It’s like a river turns into a waterfall, and until now we’ve only seen the river,” he says. Andrew Mummery at Oxford University. “If Einstein was wrong, it would be stable all the way down. There would be nothing but rivers.” Now we have our first peek at the falls, suggesting that Einstein was right. .

Mummery and his colleagues found evidence of a plunging region around a black hole in a binary star system called MAXI J1820+070, about 10,000 light-years from Earth. They used data from his space-based X-ray telescope, the Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR), to build a model of light from a black hole’s accretion disk.

They found that the model only fit the data if they included light emitted by material in the intrusion region in addition to light from the accretion disk. “Previously, it was thought that researchers could not see anything that crossed this boundary because it did not have time to clearly radiate before entering the black hole.” Greg Salvesen from Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico was not involved in the study. “But we found that this swooping region provided unexpected additional light.”

This additional light could solve a long-standing problem in X-ray astronomy: black holes appear to be spinning faster than theory predicts. Since a black hole’s rotation and the brightness of its surroundings are related, adding additional light could potentially bring the rotation back to predictability. “The rotation of a black hole can tell us all sorts of things, and the more precisely we can measure it, the more we can answer many questions in astrophysics,” Salvesen said.

This includes questions about the nature of gravity and space-time itself. Because plunging regions are some of the most extreme regions of the universe that we can observe. The plunge region is just outside the event horizon, beyond which gravity is so strong that not even light, let alone matter, can escape.

“Technically speaking, if the material had a rocket, it might be able to escape from the plunge zone, but its fate is sealed: its orbit becomes unstable and it rapidly accelerates toward the speed of light.” says Mummery. “This material has about as much chance of coming back as water falling from a waterfall.” Researchers are now investigating these strange cosmic waterfalls to uncover the conditions in these anomalous regions. I’m trying to make more observations.