Creating Black Hole Discs: Understanding the Realities of Accretion Disks

CNN Indonesia

Friday, 19 May 2023 21:10 WIB

Jakarta, CNNIndonesia —

For scientist creating a disk around a miniature version of a black hole on Earth to understand how it works’monster‘ this outer space. How to make?

Quoted from Spaceexperts create rings of superheated gas by imitating material surrounding the rim of a black hole called an accretion disk or disk that gradually feeds matter into the black hole.

Experiments conducted by researchers at Imperial College London can help scientists answer questions about how black holes grow by consuming the material that surrounds them.

“Understanding how accretion disks behave will not only help us reveal how black holes grow, but also how gas clouds collapse to form stars,” said Vicente Valenzuela Villaseca, lead author of the study and post-doctoral researcher at Princeton University, in a statement. his statement.

“And even how we can better create our own stars by understanding the stability of plasma in fusion experiments,” he continued.

The plasma disk around the black hole was captured when the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) captured the first direct image of a black hole.

The disc shape itself is a glowing orange ring of plasma surrounding the dark central black hole.

This disk is dominant in images of the supermassive black hole at the heart of the galaxy Messier 87 (M87); and the image of the supermassive black hole in the Milky Way, Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*).

These rings occur when matter is pulled into a black hole and its immense gravitational influence creates turbulent and violent conditions, heating gas and stripping electrons from the atoms that make it up.

This turns the gas into plasma, a sea of ​​atoms without electrons, or ions, and electrons. This plasma forms an accretion disk formed as a result of the stability between the outward centrifugal force exerted by its rotation and the inward gravitational force.

This stability is sometimes disturbed, causing material from the disk to fall onto the surface of the black hole.

However, scientists are quite sure how the instability arose. This is important for our understanding of black holes because these celestial bodies cannot grow without adding matter.

Making process

Humans simply cannot recreate a black hole like M87, which has a mass 4.5 billion times that of the sun.

All it might do to study the environment of this cosmic giant closely is to recreate the plasma rotating around it, as described in the journal Physical Review Letters.

The team of experts used the Mega Ampere Generator for Plasma Implosion Experiments (MAGPIE) engine to spin the plasma and create an accurate replica of the accretion disc.

This requires accelerating eight plasma beams and bringing them together to create a spinning column. The team found the plasma moved more quickly inside the column, something they believe is an important characteristic of accretion disks.

Although it allows for better accretion disk modeling, this experiment is still a proof of concept. This is because MAGPIE can only generate short plasma pulses and limits observations to no more than one full rotation of the disk.

One of the suggested mechanisms causing this instability in the plasma disk is the magnetic field. This creates friction which causes a loss of energy in the material which causes it to move towards the surface of the black hole.

“We are only in the early stages of being able to view these accretion disks in completely new ways, including our experiments and black hole footage with the Event Horizon Telescope,” said Villaseca.

“This will allow us to test our theory and see if it agrees with astronomical observations.”

(team/ar)