Black Holes: Nature's End

         Artistic representation of a black hole contorting space-time around itself.   

The black hole is a riddle wrapped in a mystery, enshrouded by utter darkness. Apart from Hawking radiation, nothing ever escapes from a black hole. 

Karl Schwarzchild, a German astronomer and physicist (1915.) Sadly, Dr.Schwarzchild died (May 11th, 1916) due to an autoimmune disease (pemphigus) and infections sustained while on the Russian front in World War I. 

Karl Schwarzchild first described the nature of black holes (then a theoretical concept) using Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity in 1916. He was in a fox hole being bombed by allied artillery fire when he first penned a letter to Albert Einstein describing the exact solution to Einstein's field equations of general relativity, for the limited case of a single spherical non-rotating mass. The term " black hole" was coined by American astronomer and physicist John Wheeler in 1967. Four years later the first black hole was discovered by astronomers at the US Naval Research Lab, in New Mexico (1971.) 

Image rendered by Dr. Katie Bouman's team at MIT's Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Lab, April, 10th 2019.

Computer scientist Katie Bouman led the research team that used the Event Horizon Telescope to capture an image of the black hole at the center of M87. It took 10 days to scan the 40 million km three-dimensional hole. Dr. Bouman's computer algorithm made it possible for the translation of that scan into an image.

Recent research into Dr. Stephen Hawking's prediction of radiation slowly eating away at black holes (termed Hawking radiation in honor of the late scientist) confirms the existence (under special laboratory conditions) of Hawking radiation via a black hole analog using sound waves and a Bose-Einstein condensate.

Magneto-optical trap (MOT), used to produce Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) at Pomona College, Claremont, CA. 

Whitaker Lab at Pomona College (an all-undergraduate community college) first cooled system atoms to a few hundred micro Kelvin using laser diodes. Atoms are then collected in their magneto-optical trap (MOT) and further cooled using a CO2laser (affectionately named, "Bernie")  to a staggering <1 Micro Kelvin, then a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) forms. 

Computer-generated graphic showing the formation of a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) in (3) successive snap-shots. Rubidium atoms cooled to 170 billionths of a degree above absolute zero begin to fuse into one "super atom" acting in unison.

Jeff Steinhouer and his colleagues at the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa used a BEC to model the event horizon of a black hole. An event horizon is the invisible boundary line from which nothing can ever escape. In a flowing stream of extremely cold gas, they simulated a cliff and measured the rate at which it fell. The researchers then used phonons (quantum sound waves) like a tiny paper boat floating over a waterfall to measure the behavior of this system. Phonons were accelerated by the surging BEC at speeds in excess of the speed of sound. So it was apparent why objects which fall into an event horizon can never escape, as inertia carries them much faster than they could ever be accelerated out of its path.