There are many ways to send a file to someone over the Internet, and whoever it is ...
The loudest picture of 2014, the film "Interstellar" directed by Chris Nolan from the first day of the show has gained immense popularity among the general public and continues to gain momentum. It received high ratings - 9/10 on Kinopoisk and 9/10 on IMDB and firmly established itself in the top five best films of all time, along with such cult films as The Shawshank Redemption, The Green Mile, Forrest Gump and " Schindler's list".
There are a lot of main advantages of Intersellar - this is a great visualization, an excellent soundtrack throughout the film, excellent acting, philosophical discussions on the topic of humanity, the theme of family and love, a powerful emotional component and a little humor. And all this merges together, perfectly complementing the picture so that 3 hours of viewing fly by in one breath. Everyone can find something for themselves in this picture. It is not necessary to delve into the laws of physics and science or know all the intricacies of space flight in order to enjoy watching it.
Of course, the film, which claims to be the best science movie, caused a powerful resonance in society - there was a large crowd of critics condemning the science of Interstellar, and discussions and disputes on the forums have tens of thousands of messages. Indeed, space flights through the Wormhole, which make it possible to overcome distances of billions of light years in a matter of minutes, flights near the Black Hole at speeds close to the speed of light, giant waves on an unusual planet, a monstrous time dilation, movement in five dimensions, out of time and space - all this goes beyond the usual idea of the world around us and is more like a fantasy.
But the entire film is built on the scientific research of astrophysicist Kip Thorne, the world's leading specialist in the field of black holes, wormholes, gravity and quantum physics, and filmed under his direction. Despite the fact that in order to make the film spectacular and present the viewer with the most complex theories in a pleasant and understandable form, one had to resort to some conventions and assumptions, challenging the scientific component of Interstellar is like arguing with Kip Thorne himself. Many of the film's moments are explained in detail in his book The Science of Interstellar, which he released shortly after filming.
You can download "The Science of Interstellar" by Kip Thorne.
Consider the key controversial points and try to describe them in simple words:
Time slowdown
From Einstein's theory of general relativity, it follows that gravity deforms space and time. Therefore, near the event horizon of Gargantua's supermassive Black Hole, time slows down so much that when the Ranger crew lands on the planet Miller, one hour spent there equals 7 years spent on Earth. And since the Endurance space station at that time remained at a considerable distance from the event horizon, time on it flowed almost as slowly as on Earth. Therefore, when returning from the planet, after 3 hours, it turned out that Romilly, who remained at the station, had aged 23 years.
On the planet Miller, the origin of life would probably have been possible if it were not for the giant waves that Cooper and his team encountered. They arise, again, due to the proximity to the event horizon of the Black Hole. A huge tidal force acts on the planet, which pulls the planet along the lines of force, and also creates a powerful tide from the direction of Gargantua. Thus, on the far side of the planet where the crew landed, the water level is so low that the characters in the film can walk on it. But due to the fact that the planet rotates rapidly, and its axis does not coincide with lines of force Black hole, there are waves that overtake the team. Waves can also be caused by tsunamis due to tectonic shifts.
Overcoming gravity
In Interstellar, you have to overcome the gravity of the planets and the Black Hole several times, and the issue of fuel economy is very acute. Events take place in the near future, and, despite the fact that space programs have been curtailed, some technologies have been developed. Thus, the shuttles Ranger and Lander had sufficiently powerful engines, but it is possible that on fuel that pollutes environment. Therefore, at the beginning of the film, the Ranger with a cargo flew to the Earth's orbit on conventional upper stages, thereby not wasting his fuel to overcome the Earth's gravity and not polluting the atmosphere. After docking with the Endurance station and after flying through the Wormhole, the Ranger descended to the planet Miller without any extra cargo, and then flew away from it, taking advantage of the gravity of the Black Hole itself. The second time the shuttles were required to take off from the planet Manna, which has a mass less than that of the Earth. The rest of the movements in the film were made on the Endurance space station.
five-dimensional space
One of the film's most spectacular moments comes after Cooper falls beyond Gargantua's event horizon and finds himself in some kind of five-dimensional space. Our world, which has three spatial coordinates and one time coordinate, in this space is called a brane, by analogy with a two-dimensional membrane in three dimensions. This five-dimensional space-time was shown to us as director Chris Nolan sees it. Because it is impossible in principle to depict a five-dimensional world on a two-dimensional screen. But this performance was truly magnificent. This five-dimensional world "they" - the people of the future created for Cooper and closed it on the room so that Cooper could send his daughter the NASA coordinates and quantum data collected by the TARS robot from the other side of the black hole. Cooper transmitted the data using gravity, which does not depend on space and time, sending them in binary code to the daughter's clock hand. This data further helped Murph solve the equation of gravity, which would help to connect various theories into one and help people understand gravity itself. After transmitting the data, "they" sent Cooper to a location near Saturn at the right time to be picked up and taken to the station.
Wormholes
In theory, there are Wormholes (wormholes) - tunnels in hyperspace, connecting the curved space in the shortest way. On the this moment only such burrows are known, the lifetime of which is less than it takes light to fly from one end to the other. The film features a wormhole that has existed for more than 50 Earth years, through which 12 explorers and the Endurance crew traveled to another galaxy in a very short time. The existence of such a hole has not been proven or refuted, and its properties have not been studied. It is not known whether it is actually possible to fly over it, and how it would interact with the planets. solar system.
Black hole and unusual system of planets.
The fictional supermassive Gargantua Black Hole has a mass of 100 million suns and lies 10 billion light-years from Earth. It rotates at a speed close to the speed of light, and with its gravity pulls the surrounding objects. Around Gargantua, an accretion disk of hot gas and dust forms, which, due to friction, emits radiation and light that heats the planets in its system. One of the main achievements in the film was a visual representation of what the accretion disk of a Black Hole looks like when it is lensed - the direction of propagation of radiation is bent by the gravitational field, just as light is bent when passing through an ordinary lens. Due to the fact that Gargantua has a huge mass, the effect of tidal forces at a considerable distance from the event horizon is quite small. Therefore, planets, with a sufficiently high rotation speed in orbits, can exist quite long time so that they can live on. And they receive heat sufficient for life from the accretion disk of the Black Hole.
Ecological catastrophe of the Earth
At the beginning of the movie Interstellar, a near-future global environmental catastrophe is shown that threatens all life on Earth. Due to a harmful fungus, crops die, everything except corn increases the concentration of nitrogen in the atmosphere and the climate worsens. The issue of ecology on Earth has been very acute lately, and with the current irrational use of natural resources, such a catastrophe can come very soon. The reasons for the deterioration of the environment are different - this is the emission of gases into the atmosphere, the use of pesticides and chemicals for plants, genetically modified products, and so on. All this negatively affects our planet, and it begins to reject humanity. This is exactly what happens in the film.
Planetary exploration
On the other side of the wormhole, the researchers found a star system. From there it was possible to give only a primitive signal and only once a year. Therefore, 12 researchers had to collect information about the habitability of the planets after landing and transmit them in the simplest form, whether they are suitable or not. Positive signals came from several planets, including three planets in the Gargantua system - the planets Miller, Mann and Edmunds. The Cooper crew decided to go to these three planets, and, having little to no data on the planets themselves, explore them, saving fuel and time.
In general, the film Interstellar raises a lot of questions about which disputes will circulate for a long time to come. And this is one of the advantages of this movie, because. it prompted to reflect on the considered problems not only ordinary people but also prominent scientists. And, it is quite possible that it will have some impact on the further study and exploration of space. But do not forget that, although Interstellar is science fiction, it is primarily a feature film. And everything that the film crew wanted to convey to the viewer is presented in it just fine.
Interview with Chris Nolan and Jessica Chastain:
Interview with Matthew McConaughey and Anne Hathaway:
You can also download the archive with posters and wallpapers of the movie Interstellar in high resolution and The Science of Interstellar by Kip Thorne:
Download archive with wallpapers and posters (zip)
Download the book "The Science of Interstellar" (pdf)
1) Why does Gargantua's black hole look like this in the movie?
The film Interstellar is the first feature film in the history of cinema, where the visualization of a black hole was applied based on a physical and mathematical model. The simulation was carried out by a team of 30 people (Pavel Franklin's visual effects department) in collaboration with Kip Thorne, a world-renowned theoretical physicist known for his work in the theory of gravity, astrophysics and quantum theory measurements. About 100 hours were spent on one frame, and in total the model took about 800 terabytes of data.
Thorne created not only a mathematical model, but also wrote specialized software (CGI) that made it possible to build computer model visualization.
Here's what Thorn did:
Of course, it is fair to ask the question: is Thorne's simulation the first in the history of science? And is Thorne's image something never before seen in scientific literature? Of course no.
Jean Pierre Luminet of the Paris-Mudon Observatory, Department of Relativistic Astrophysics and Cosmology, also acquired worldwide fame with his work in the field of black holes and cosmology, he was one of the first scientists to obtain an image of a black hole by computer simulation. In 1987, his book Black Holes: A Popular Introduction was published, where he writes:
“The first computer images of a black hole surrounded by an accretion disk were obtained by me (Luminet, J.-P. (1979): Astron. Astrophys.). More subtle calculations were made by Mark (Marck, J.-A. (1993): Class. Quantum Grav) both for the Schwarzschild metric and for the case of a rotating black hole. Plausible images - that is, calculated taking into account the curvature of space, redshift and the physical properties of the disk - can be obtained for an arbitrary point, even inside the event horizon. A film has even been made showing how these distortions change as one moves along a timelike trajectory around a black hole (Delesalle, Lachieze-Rey and Luminet, 1993). The drawing is one of his frames for the case of movement along a hinged parabolic trajectory "
Explanation of why the image is the way it is:
"Due to the curvature of space-time in the vicinity of a black hole, the image of the system differs significantly from the ellipses that we would see if we replaced the black hole with an ordinary low-mass celestial body. The radiation from the upper side of the disk forms a direct image, and due to strong distortion, we see the entire disk (the black hole does not cover the parts of the disk behind it from us). The lower part of the disk is also visible due to the significant curvature of light rays. "
The image of Lumine surprisingly resembles the result of Thorne, which he obtained more than 30 years after the work of the Frenchman!
Why is it that in numerous other visualizations, both in articles and popular science films, a black hole can often be seen in a completely different way? The answer is simple: computer "drawing" of a black hole based on a mathematical model is a very complex and time-consuming process that often does not fit into modest budgets, so the authors most often get by with the work of a designer, not a physicist.
2) Why is Gargantua's accretion disk not as spectacular as one can see in numerous pictures and popular science films? Why couldn't the black hole be shown brighter and more imposing?
I'll combine this question with the following:
3) It is known that the accretion disk of a black hole is a source of very intense radiation. Astronauts would simply die if they approached a black hole.
And indeed it is. Black holes are the engines of the brightest, most energetic sources of radiation in the universe. By modern ideas, the heart of quasars, which sometimes shine brighter than hundreds of galaxies put together, is a black hole. With its gravity, it attracts huge masses of matter, forcing it to shrink in a small area under unimaginable high pressure. This substance heats up, nuclear reactions flow in it with the emission of the most powerful X-ray and gamma radiation.
This is how often a classic black hole accretion disk is drawn:
If Gargantua were like that, then such an accretion disk would kill astronauts with its radiation. The accretion at Thorne's black hole is not so dense and massive; according to his model, the temperature of the disk is no higher than at the surface of the Sun. This is largely due to the fact that Gargantua is a supermassive black hole with a mass of at least 100 million solar masses, with a radius of one astronomical unit.
This is not just a supermassive, but an ultramassive black hole. Even the black hole at the center of the Milky Way has, according to various estimates, a mass of 4-4.5 million solar masses.
Although Gargantua is far from a champion. For example, a hole in the galaxy NGC 1277 has a mass of 17 billion suns.
The idea of imagining such an experiment in which people explore a black hole has been bothering Thorne since the 80s. Already in his book “Black holes and the folds of time. Einstein's Audacious Legacy, published in 1990, Thorne considers a hypothetical model of interstellar travel in which researchers study black holes in an effort to get as close as possible to the event horizon in order to better understand its properties.
The researchers start with a small black hole. She does not suit them at all because the tidal forces she creates are too great and life-threatening. They change the object of study to a more massive black hole. But she does not satisfy them either. Finally, they head towards the giant Gargantua.
Gargantua is located near the quasar 3C273 - which allows you to compare the properties of the two holes.
Observing them, researchers ask the question:
"The difference between Gargantua and 3C273 seems surprising: why doesn't Gargantua, a thousand times its mass and size, have such a round donut of gas and giant quasar jets?"
The Gargantua accretion disk is relatively cold, not massive, and does not radiate as much energy as it does in a quasar. Why?
"After telescopic studies, Bret finds the answer: once every few months, a star orbiting the central hole 3C273 comes close to the horizon and is torn apart by the tidal forces of the black hole. The remnants of the star, approximately 1 solar mass, splatter in the vicinity of the black hole. Gradually, internal friction drives the splattering gas inside This fresh gas compensates for the gas that the donut constantly supplies to the hole and the jets, so the donut and jets maintain their gas reserves and continue to shine brightly.
Bret explains that the stars can come close to Gargantua as well. But because Gargantua is so much larger than 3C273, its tidal forces above the event horizon are too weak to tear apart the star. Gargantua swallows stars whole, without splattering their insides into the surrounding donut. And without the donut, Gargantua can't create the jets and other features of the quasar."
In order for a massive radiating disk to exist around a black hole, there must be building material from which it can form. In a quasar, these are dense gas clouds, very close to the black hole of a star. Here is the classical model for the formation of an accretion disk:
In Interstellar, it is clear that there is simply nothing for a massive accretion disk to arise from. There are no dense clouds or nearby stars in the system. If there was anything, it's all been eaten up a long time ago.
Gargantua's only content is low-density clouds of interstellar gas, creating a faint, "low-temperature" accretion disk that doesn't radiate as intensely as classical disks in quasars or binary systems. Therefore, the radiation of the Gargantua disk will not kill the astronauts.
Thorne writes in The Science of Interstellar:
"A typical accretion disk has very intense X-ray, gamma and radio emissions. So strong that it will fry any astronaut who decides to be near. The Gargantua disk shown in the film is an extremely weak disk. "Weak" - not by human standards, of course, but by the standards of typical quasars.Instead of being heated to hundreds of millions of degrees, as quasar accretion disks are, the Gargantua disk is only a few thousand degrees hot, about the same as the surface of the Sun.It emits a lot of light, but almost no x-rays and gamma rays "rays. Such disks may exist in the later stages of black hole evolution. Therefore, the Gargantua disk is quite different from the picture you often see on various popular astrophysics resources."
Is Kip Thorne the only one who has suggested the existence of cold accretion disks around black holes? Of course no.
The cold accretion disks of black holes have long been studied in the scientific literature:
According to some reports, the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way, Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*), has just the same cold accretion disk:
Around our central black hole, there may be an inactive cold accretion disk, left over (due to low viscosity) from the "turbulent youth" of Sgr A*, when the accretion rate was high. Now this disk "sucks in" the hot gas, preventing it from falling into the black hole: the gas settles in the disk at relatively large distances from the black hole.
(c) Close stars and an inactive accretion disc in Sgr A∗: eclipses and flares
Sergei Nayakshin1 and Rashid Sunyaev. // 1. Max-Planck-Institut fur Astrophysik, Karl-Schwarzschild-Str. Garching, Germany 2. Space Research Institute, Moscow, Russia
Or Cygnus X-1:
Performed spectral and temporal analysis a large number observations by the RXTE observatory of the accreting black holes Cygnus X-1, GX339-4 and GS1354-644 in the low spectral state during 1996-1998. For all three sources, a correlation was found between the characteristic frequencies of chaotic variability and spectral parameters - the slope of the Comptonized radiation spectrum and the relative amplitude of the reflected component. The relationship between the amplitude of the reflected component and the slope of the Comptonization spectrum shows that the reflecting medium ( cold accretion disk) is the main supplier of soft photons to the Comptonization region.
(c) Report at SPIE organization Conference "Astronomical Telescopes and Instrumentation", 21-31 March 2000, Munich, Germany
Interaction Between Stars and an Inactive Accretion Disc in a Galactic Core // Vladimır Karas. Astronomical Institute, Academy of Sciences, Prague, Czech Republic and
(c) Charles University, Faculty of Mathematics and Physics, Prague, Czech Republic // Ladislav Subr. Charles University, Faculty of Mathematics and Physics, Prague, Czech Republic
"Quiet" black holes are similar to the hole in the Andromeda Nebula - one of the first discovered supermassive black holes. Its mass is about 140 million solar masses. But they found it not by strong radiation, but by the characteristic movement of stars around this area. There is no strong radiation, because matter simply does not fall on it. Like the black hole at the center of the Milky Way.
4) Black holes are known to have deadly tidal forces. Won't they tear apart both the astronauts and Miller's planet, which in the movie is too close to the event horizon?
Even laconic Wikipedia writes about one important property of a supermassive black hole:
“Tidal forces near the event horizon are much weaker due to the fact that the central singularity is located so far from the horizon that a hypothetical astronaut traveling to the center of a black hole will not feel the effects of extreme tidal forces until he dives very deeply into it. »
Any scientific and popular sources that describe the properties of supermassive black holes agree with this.
The location of the point at which tidal forces reach such a magnitude that they destroy the object that has fallen there depends on the size of the black hole. For supermassive black holes, such as those located in the center of the Galaxy, this point lies within their event horizon, so a hypothetical astronaut can cross their event horizon without noticing any deformations, but after crossing the event horizon, his fall to the center of the black hole is already inevitable . For small black holes, in which the Schwarzschild radius is much closer to the singularity, tidal forces will kill the astronaut before he even reaches the event horizon.
(c) Schwarzschild black holes // General relativity: an introduction for physicists. - Cambridge University Press, 2006. - P. 265. - ISBN 0-521-82951-8.
Of course, Gargantua's mass was chosen so as not to tear the astronauts apart by the tides.
It is worth noting that Thorn Gargantua of 1990 is somewhat more massive than Interstellar:
“Calculations have shown that the larger the hole, the less thrust the rocket needs to keep it on a circle of 1.0001 event horizon. For a painful but tolerable thrust of 10 Earth g, the mass of the hole would have to be 15 trillion solar masses. The closest of these holes is called Gargantua, it is located at a distance of 100,000 light-years from our galaxy and 100 million light-years from the Virgo cluster of galaxies, around which the Milky Way revolves. In fact, it is located near the 3C273 quasar, 2 billion light years from the Milky Way...
When you enter Gargantua's orbit and make the usual measurements, you are convinced that its mass is indeed 15 trillion solar masses and that it rotates very slowly. From this data, you calculate that the circumference of its horizon is 29 light years. Finally, it calculates that this is a hole, the vicinity of which you can explore, experiencing the allowable tidal forces and acceleration!
In the 2014 book The Science of Interstellar, where Kip Thorne describes scientific aspects work on the film, he already cites the figure of 100 million solar masses - but noting that this is the minimum mass that a black hole "comfortable" in relation to tidal forces can have.
5) How can Miller's planet exist so close to a black hole? Will it be torn apart by tidal forces?
Astronomer Phil Plant, known by the nickname "Bad Astronomer" for his rampant skepticism, simply could not get past Interstellar. In addition, before that, he angrily destroyed many sensational films, such as Gravity, with his boring skepticism.
“I was really looking forward to Interstellar.. But what I saw was terrible. This is a complete failure. I really, really didn’t like it.”he writes in his November 6th article.
Phil says that in terms of science, the film is complete bullshit. Which even in a hypothetical framework cannot correspond to modern scientific ideas. He especially drove around Miller's planet. A planet could orbit such a black hole stably, he said, but its orbit would have to be at least three times over size Gargantua herself. The clock will run slower than on Earth, but only by 20 percent. The stability of a planet close to a black hole, as shown in the film, is an impossible fiction. In addition, it will be completely torn apart by the tidal forces of the black hole.
But on November 9th, Plate appears with a new article. He calls her Follow-Up: Interstellar Mea Culpa. The irrepressible scientific critic decided to repent.
“I screwed up again. But regardless of the magnitude of my mistakes, I always try to admit them. After all, science itself forces us to admit our mistakes and learn from them!”
Phil Plant admitted that he made mistakes in his considerations and came to the wrong conclusions:
“In my review, I talked about Miller's planet orbiting close to the black hole. An hour spent on the planet is equal to seven Earth years. My complaint was that with such time dilation, a stable orbit of the planet would be impossible.
And that's true... for a non-rotating black hole. My mistake was. that I didn't use the correct equations for a black hole that was spinning fast! This greatly changes the picture of space-time around a black hole. Now I understand that a stable orbit for this planet around a black hole may well exist, and so close to the event horizon that the time dilation indicated in the film is possible. Basically, I was wrong.
I also stated in my initial analysis that gravitational tides will tear this planet apart. I consulted with a couple of astrophysicists who also said that the Gargantua tides should probably destroy the planet, but this has not yet been mathematically confirmed. They are still working on a solution to this problem - and as soon as it is solved, I will publish the solution. I myself can't say whether I was right or wrong in my analysis - and even if I was right, my considerations still only concerned a non-rotating black hole, so they are not valid for this case.
To solve such a problem, many mathematical problems need to be discussed. But I do not know exactly how far Miller's planet was from Gargantua, and therefore it is very difficult to say whether the tides would have destroyed it or not. I haven't read The Science of Interstellar by physicist and executive producer Kip Thorne yet - I think it will shed some light on this problem.
However, I was wrong about the stability of the orbit - and I now consider it necessary to cancel this claim of mine on the film.
So, to sum up: the physical picture near the black hole, shown in the film, is actually consistent with science. I made a mistake for which I apologize.
Ikjyot Singh Kohli, a theoretical physicist at Yore University, on his page provided solutions to the equations, proving that the existence of Miller's planet is quite possible.
He found a solution in which the planet would exist in the conditions shown in the film. But he also discussed the problem of tidal forces, which supposedly should tear the planet apart. His solution shows that the tidal forces are too weak to tear it apart.
He even substantiated the presence of giant waves on the surface of the planet.
Considerations by Singh Kohli with examples of equations here:
This is how Miller Thorne shows the location of the planet in his book:
There are points at which the orbit will be unstable. But Thorne also found a stable orbit:
Tidal forces do not tear the planet, but deform it:
If the planet revolves around the source of tidal forces, then they will constantly change their direction, deforming it in different ways at different points of the orbit. In one position, the planet will be flattened from east to west and stretched from north to south. At another point in the orbit, it is squeezed from north to south and stretched from east to west. Because Gargantua's gravity is so strong, the changing internal strain and friction will heat up the planet, making it very hot. But as we saw in the movie, Miller's planet looks very different.
Therefore, it would be fair to assume that the planet is always turned to Gargantua on one side. And this is natural for many bodies that revolve around a stronger gravitating object. For example, our Moon, many satellites of Jupiter and Saturn are always turned to the planet with only one side.
Thorn also settled on another important point:
“If you look at Miller's planet from the planet Manna, you can see how it revolves around Gargantua with an orbital period of 1.7 hours, covering almost a billion kilometers in this time. That's about half the speed of light! Due to time dilation for the Ranger crew, this period is reduced to a tenth of a second. It's very fast! And isn't that much faster than the speed of light? No, because in the frame of reference of the vortex-like moving space around Gargantua, the planet moves more slowly than light.
In my scientific model of the film, the planet is always turned to the black hole on one side, and rotates at breakneck speed. Won't centrifugal forces tear the planet apart because of this speed? No: she is again saved by the spinning whirlwind of space. The planet will not feel destructive centrifugal forces, since space itself rotates with it at the same speed"
6) How are such gigantic waves possible on the surface of Miller's planet?
To this question, Thorne answers as follows:
“I made the necessary physical calculations, and found two possible scientific interpretations.
Both of these solutions require the position of the planet's axis of rotation to be unstable. The planet should wobble in some range, as shown in the picture. This happens under the influence of Gargantua's gravity.When I calculated the period of this swing, I got a value of about an hour. And this coincided with the time that Chris chose - before that he did not yet know about my scientific interpretation!
My second model is the tsunami. The tidal forces of Gargantua can deform the crust of Miller's planet, with the same period (1 hour). These deformations can create very strong earthquakes. They can generate tsunamis that are vastly larger than any ever seen on Earth."
Original entry and comments on
A black hole arises as a result of the collapse of a supermassive star, the core of which runs out of "fuel" for a nuclear reaction. As the contraction progresses, the temperature of the core rises, and photons with an energy of more than 511 keV, colliding, form electron-positron pairs, which leads to a catastrophic decrease in pressure and further collapse of the star under the influence of its own gravity.
Astrophysicist Ethan Siegel published the article "The Largest Black Hole in the Known Universe" in which he collected information about the mass of black holes in different galaxies. Just wondering: where is the most massive of them?
Since the densest clusters of stars are in the center of galaxies, now almost every galaxy has a massive black hole, formed after the merger of many others. For example, in the center milky way there is a black hole with a mass of about 0.1% of our galaxy, that is, 4 million times the mass of the Sun.
It is very easy to determine the presence of a black hole by studying the trajectory of the movement of stars, which are affected by the gravity of an invisible body.
But the Milky Way is a relatively small galaxy that can't possibly have the largest black hole. For example, not far from us in the Virgo cluster is the giant galaxy Messier 87 - it is about 200 times larger than ours.
So, a stream of matter about 5000 light years long breaks out from the center of this galaxy (pictured). It's a crazy anomaly, writes Ethan Siegel, but it looks very nice.
Scientists believe that the only explanation for such an "eruption" from the center of the galaxy can be a black hole. The calculation shows that the mass of this black hole is about 1500 times greater than the mass of a black hole in the Milky Way, that is, approximately 6.6 billion solar masses.
But where is the largest black hole in the universe? If we proceed from the calculation that in the center of almost every galaxy there is such an object with a mass of 0.1% of the mass of the galaxy, then we need to find the most massive galaxy. Scientists can answer this question too.
The most massive galaxy known to us is IC 1101 at the center of the Abell 2029 cluster, which is 20 times further from the Milky Way than the Virgo cluster.
In IC 1101, the distance from the center to the farthest edge is about 2 million light years. Its size is twice as large as the distance from the Milky Way to our nearest galaxy, Andromeda. The mass is almost equal to the mass of the entire cluster of Virgo!
If there is a black hole at the center of IC 1101 (and there should be), then it could be the most massive in the known Universe.
Ethan Siegel says he could be wrong. The reason is the unique galaxy NGC 1277. This is not a very large galaxy, slightly smaller than ours. But the analysis of its rotation showed an incredible result: the black hole in the center is 17 billion solar masses, and this is already 17% of the total mass of the galaxy. This is a record for the ratio of the mass of a black hole to the mass of a galaxy.
There is another candidate for the largest black hole in the known universe. It is shown in the next photo.
The strange object OJ 287 is called a blazar. Blazars are a special class of extragalactic objects, a kind of quasars. They are distinguished by very powerful radiation, which in OJ 287 changes with a cycle of 11-12 years (with a double peak).
According to astrophysicists, OJ 287 includes a supermassive central black hole orbiting another smaller black hole. At 18 billion solar masses, the central black hole is the largest known to date.
This pair of black holes will be one of the best experiments to test the general theory of relativity, namely the deformation of space-time, described in general relativity.
Due to relativistic effects, the perihelion of the black hole, that is, the point of the orbit closest to the center black hole, must move 39° per revolution! By comparison, Mercury's perihelion has shifted by only 43 arcseconds per century.
A black hole is a region of space-time, the gravitational attraction of which is so strong that even light cannot leave it. Black holes that have grown to gigantic sizes form the cores of most galaxies.
A supermassive black hole is a black hole with a mass of about 105-1010 solar masses. As of 2014, supermassive black holes have been found at the center of many galaxies, including our Milky Way.
The heaviest supermassive black hole outside of our galaxy is in a galaxy in the giant elliptical galaxy NGC 4889 in the constellation Coma Berenices. Its mass is about 21 billion solar masses!
In this image, the galaxy NGC 4889 is in the center. Somewhere out there lurks the same giant.
There is no generally accepted theory of the formation of black holes of such a mass. There are several hypotheses, the most obvious of which is the hypothesis that describes the gradual increase in the mass of a black hole by the gravitational attraction of matter (usually gas) from outer space. The difficulty in the formation of a supermassive black hole lies in the fact that a sufficient amount of matter for this must be concentrated in a relatively small volume.
An artist's view of a supermassive black hole and its accretion disk.
Spiral galaxy NGC 4845 (type Sa) in the constellation Virgo, located at a distance of 65 million light years from Earth. At the center of the galaxy is a supermassive black hole with a mass of about 230,000 solar masses.
The space observatory Chandra (Chandra X-ray Observatory, NASA) recently provided evidence that many supermassive black holes rotate at a tremendous speed. The measured rotation speed of one of the black holes is 3.5 trillion. miles per hour is about half the speed of light, and its incredible gravity pulls the surrounding space along for many millions of kilometers.
Spiral galaxy NGC 1097 in the constellation Furnace. At the center of the galaxy is a supermassive black hole that is 100 million times heavier than our sun. It sucks into itself any matter in the vicinity.
The most powerful quasar in the galaxy Markarian 231 can receive energy from two centrally located black holes that circle around each other. According to scientists, the mass of the central black hole exceeds the solar mass by 150 million times, the mass of the satellite black hole is 4 million times greater than the solar one. This dynamic duo absorbs galactic matter and produces great amount energy, causing a radiance at the center of the galaxy, capable of eclipsing the radiance of billions of stars.
Quasars are the brightest sources in the Universe, the light of which is brighter than the glow of their galaxies. There is a hypothesis that quasars are the nuclei of distant galaxies at the stage of unusually high activity. The quasar at the center of the Markarian 231 galaxy is the closest such object to us and manifests itself as a compact radio source. Scientists estimate its age at only a million years.
The giant elliptical galaxy M60 and the spiral galaxy NGC 4647 look like a very strange couple. They are both in the constellation Virgo. Bright M60, about 54 million light-years away, has a simple egg shape, which is created by the random swarming old stars. NGC 4647 (upper right), in contrast, is composed of young blue stars, gas, and dust, which are located in the swirling arms of a flat rotating disk.
At the center of M60 is a supermassive black hole with 4.5 billion solar masses.
Galaxy 4C+29.30, located at a distance of 850 million light years from Earth. At the center is a supermassive black hole. Its mass is 100 million times the mass of our Sun.
Astronomers have long sought confirmation that Sagittarius A, our supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way, is the source of the plasma jet. Finally, they found it - this is evidenced by new results obtained by the Chandra X-ray observatory (Chandra) and the VLA radio telescope. This jet or jet is formed by the absorption of matter by a supermassive black hole, and its existence has long been predicted by theorists.
Using the highest quality X-ray images, astronomers have found the first clear evidence that massive black holes were similar in the early universe. Studies and observations of distant galaxies have shown that they all have similar supermassive black holes. At least 30 million supermassive similar black holes were found in the early universe. This is 10,000 times more than previously thought.
The artist's drawing depicts a growing supermassive black hole.
Barred spiral galaxy NGC 4945 (SBc) in the constellation Centaurus. It is quite similar to our Galaxy, but X-ray observations show the presence of a core, probably containing an active supermassive black hole.
Cluster PKS 0745-19. The black hole at the center is one of the 18 largest known black holes in the universe.
A powerful stream of particles from a supermassive black hole that hit a nearby galaxy. Astronomers have observed collisions of galaxies before, but such a "cosmic shot" is recorded for the first time. The "incident" occurred in a star system located at a distance of 1.4 billion light years from Earth, where the process of merging two galaxies is currently underway. The "black hole" of the larger of the two galaxies, which astronomers compare to the "Death Star" from the Star Wars movie epic, threw out a powerful stream of charged particles that landed directly on the neighboring galaxy.
The youngest black hole has been found. The progenitor of the newcomer was a supernova that erupted just 31 years ago.
Artistic depiction of a black hole swallowing space. Since the theoretical prediction of black holes, the question of their existence has remained open, since the presence of a “black hole” type solution does not yet guarantee that there are mechanisms for the formation of such objects in the Universe.
Black hole flares in the spiral galaxy M83 (also known as the South Pinwheel) taken by NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory. The South Pinwheel is located at a distance of approximately 15 million light years from us.
Barred spiral galaxy NGC 4639 in the constellation Virgo. NGC 4639 harbors a massive black hole that is sucking in cosmic gas and dust.
Galaxy M 77 in the constellation Cetus. At its center is a supermassive black hole.
The artists depicted the black hole of our Galaxy - Sagittarius A*. This is an object of great mass. By analyzing the elements of the orbits, it was first determined that the weight of the object is 2.6 million solar masses, and this mass is contained in a volume of no more than 17 light hours (120 AU) in diameter.
Look into the mouth of a black hole. Astronomers of the Japanese aerospace agency JAXA managed to obtain a unique image of the black hole's mouth and rare phenomena in its vicinity using NASA's WISE infrared space laboratory. The object of WISE observation was a black hole 6 times the mass of the sun and listed in the catalogs under the name GX 339-4. Near GX 339-4, located at a distance of more than 20 thousand light years from Earth, a star is orbiting, the substance of which is drawn into a black hole under the influence of its monstrous gravitational field, which is 30 thousand times stronger than on the surface of our planet. In this case, part of this substance is ejected from the black hole into reverse direction, forming jets of particles moving at near-light speeds.
Galaxy NGC 3081 in the constellation Hydra. It is located at a distance of about 86 million light years from the solar system. Scientists believe that NGC 3081 has a supermassive black hole at its center.
Sleeping and dreaming. Nearly a decade ago, NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory captured signs of what appears to be a black hole sucking gas right at the center of the nearby Sculptor galaxy. And in 2013, NASA's NuSTAR space telescope, which detects hard X-rays, takes a quick look in the same direction and discovers a peacefully sleeping black hole (over the past 10 years it has passed into an inactive state).
The mass of a sleeping black hole is about 5 million times the mass of our Sun. The black hole is at the center of the Sculptor galaxy, also known as NGC 253.
The plasma ejected by supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies can carry enormous amounts of energy over gigantic distances. The 3C353 region, as seen by X-rays from the Chandra and Very Large Array telescopes, is surrounded by plasma ejected from one of the black holes. Against the background of giant "feathers" of radiation, galaxies look like tiny dots in the center.
So according to the artist, a supermassive black hole with a mass of several million to billions of times the mass of our Sun may look like. The difficulty in the formation of a supermassive black hole lies in the fact that a sufficient amount of matter for this must be concentrated in a relatively small volume.
The universe is fraught with many mysteries. The structure and features of various, the possibility of interplanetary travel attract the attention of not only scientists, but also science fiction lovers. Naturally, the most attractive is what has unique properties which, due to various circumstances, has not been sufficiently studied. Such objects include black holes.
Black holes are very high density and incredibly strong gravitational force. Not even rays of light can escape from them. That is why scientists can "see" a black hole only due to the effect that it has on the surrounding space. In the immediate vicinity of a black hole, the matter is heated and moves with very high speed. This gaseous substance called an accretion disk, which looks like a flat luminous cloud. Scientists observe X-ray emission from the accretion disk in X-ray telescopes. They also fix the huge speed of the movement of stars in their orbits, which occurs due to the high gravity of an invisible object of huge mass. Astronomers distinguish three classes of black holes:
Black holes with stellar mass
Black holes with intermediate mass
Supermassive black holes.
A stellar mass is considered to be between three and one hundred solar masses. Black holes are called supermassive, having from hundreds of thousands to several billion solar masses. They are usually found in the center of galaxies.
Second space velocity or escape velocity - this is the minimum that must be achieved to overcome the gravitational attraction and go beyond the orbit of a given celestial body. For the Earth, the escape velocity is eleven kilometers per second, and for a black hole it is more than three hundred thousand, that's how strong its gravity is! 
The boundary of a black hole is called the event horizon. An object that gets inside it can no longer leave this area. The size of the event horizon is proportional to the mass of the black hole. To show how huge the density of black holes is, scientists give the following numbers - a black hole with a mass 10 times the Sun's would be about 60 km in diameter, and a black hole with the mass of our Earth would be only 2 cm. But this only theoretical calculations, since scientists have not yet identified black holes that have not reached three solar masses. Everything that enters the event horizon region moves towards the singularity. Singularity, to put it simply, is a place where density tends to infinity. It is impossible to draw a geodesic line through a gravitational singularity. A black hole is characterized by a curvature of the structure of space and time. A straight line, which in physics is the path of light in a vacuum, becomes a curve near a black hole. What kind physical laws work near the singularity point and directly in it is still unknown. Some researchers, for example, talk about the presence of so-called wormholes, or space-time tunnels, in black holes. But not all scientists agree to admit the existence of such wormhole tunnels.
Topic space travel, space-time tunnels serves as a source of inspiration for science fiction writers, screenwriters and directors. In 2014, the premiere of the film "Interstellar" took place. A whole group of scientists worked on its creation. Their leader was a well-known scientist, a specialist in the theory of gravity, astrophysics - Kip Stephen Thorne. This film is considered one of the most scientific among science fiction films and, accordingly, high demands are placed on it. There has been much debate about how the various moments of the film correspond to scientific facts. There was even a book published, The Science of Interstellar, in which Professor Stephen Thorne explains various episodes from the film from a scientific point of view. He talked about how much of the film is based on both scientific facts and scientific assumptions. However, there is also a simple artistic fiction. For example, the Gargantua black hole is represented as a luminous disk that bends around light. This is not at odds with scientific knowledge, because. not the black hole itself is visible, but only the accretion disk, and light cannot move in a straight line due to powerful gravity and curvature of space.
Gargantua's black hole contains a wormhole, which is a wormhole or tunnel through space and time. The presence of such tunnels in black holes is just a scientific assumption that many scientists disagree with. Fiction includes the ability to travel through such a tunnel and return back.
The black hole of Gargantua is a fantasy of the creators of Interstellar, which in many respects corresponds to real space objects. Therefore, for particularly fierce critics, I would like to remind you that the film, nevertheless, is science fiction, and not popular science. It shows the beauty and grandeur of the world that surrounds us, reminds us of how many unsolved problems there are. And to demand from a science fiction film an accurate reflection of scientifically proven facts is somewhat unlawful and naive.
