Another sonication project was carried out by a group led by Irene Kara, an astrophysicist at MIT, as part of an effort to use light echoes from X-ray bursts to map the environment around a black hole, much like using bats. Sounds to catch mosquitoes.
This is all the fruit of “Black Hole Week,” NASA’s annual social media extravaganza, May 2-6. This week also provides an introduction to important news on May 12, when researchers used the Event Horizon Telescope, which was produced in 2019. The first image of a black holeto announce their latest results.
A black hole, according to Einstein’s theory of general relativity, is an object with a gravitational pull so strong that nothing, not even light, let alone sound, can escape. Ironically, they can also be the brightest things in the universe. Before any matter disappears forever into a black hole, theorists believe, it will be accelerated to near the speed of light by the hole’s gravitational field, heating up and rotating by millions of degrees. This would release a flash of X-rays, generate an interstellar shock wave, and compress the high-energy beam and particles through space like toothpaste from a tube.
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