Jakarta –
J. Robert Oppenheimer is widely known in history as the father of the atomic bomb. But before the label was pinned, he had a work that was stronger than the atomic bomb made by the Manhattan Project he led, a black hole or black hole.
In a 1939 paper, Oppenheimer, then a particle physicist, stated that black holes were an inevitable result of Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity. He also stated that black holes are not just a mathematical quirk, but a possible real astrophysical object.
“In 1915, Einstein proposed his equations of general relativity, his masterpiece. A masterpiece that lifts space-time from the stage to participant in the drama,” Avery Broderick, an astrophysicist at the University of Waterloo, told Inverse. Einstein’s field equations explain how the mass of matter warps the fabric of space-time, and how space-time in turn tells matter how to move.
A year later in 1916, German physicist Karl Schwarzschild came up with the first solution to Einstein’s field equations, “which is quite impressive, because it’s a difficult equation to solve,” said Broderick.
But Schwartzchild’s solution implies something odd: That you could have a large mass at a single point, the singularity, that would warp space-time so that anything coming within a certain radius of that point can never come out again.
“Schwartzchild’s calculations show that theoretically, you can have a region of spacetime that is like a knot that you can’t untie. And Einstein rebelled against that.” said Doeleman, an astrophysicist at the Harvard & Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and director of the Event Horizon Telescope
Despite constructing the general theory of relativity, Einstein, like many other physicists at the time, considered singularities to be the mathematical ghost of the Schwartschild solution, or at least a condition that nature could never put into practice.
“Einstein’s approach or response to this was very natural, very experienced. He was like, Ah! this can’t be happening. Nature is going to stop this, we don’t know how,” Broderick said. “You know, the universe intervenes.”
But in a 1939 paper entitled “On Continued Gravitational Contraction,” Oppenheimer and his co-author Hartland Snyder showed that a sufficiently massive star, when it used up its nuclear fuel, would contract forever, forming what we now know as a black hole.
“A lot of what has emerged as a popular descriptor and account of black holes, at least as far as I’m aware, comes from this paper,” said Robert McNees, Loyola University Astrophysicist.
This strange find was eventually buried for years due to the advent of World War II and the Manhattan Project which closed Oppenheimer’s work in astrophysics. It took the work of John Wheeler in the 1950s, and then Roger Penrose and Stephen Hawking in the 1960s and 70s. , to continue the work Oppenheimer started and fill in the understanding of black holes that we have today.
“It was the 60s and 70s where people started seeing cosmic objects that looked like black holes, and that started a big observational push to look at these things,” Doeleman said.
X-rays and other observations will continue to find evidence suggesting black holes. As in 2019, the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) collaboration released its first image of a black hole. A supermassive black hole at its heart, galaxy Messier 87, so we can imagine an event horizon.
The next steps in the EHT project are to go from stills to film, get a dynamic picture of how matter spirals into a supermassive black hole, and look for clues that might provide clues to what lies beyond the event horizon, according to Doeleman. It could help solve the biggest mystery in physics, how Einstein’s theory of gravity and quantum mechanics, the rules that govern the other forces in the universe, fit together.
“At the center of a black hole in a singularity, that’s where quantum physics and gravitational physics, which have never been shown to be consistent with each other, have to combine,” said Doeleman. “We knew that they had to join in. And we didn’t know how that could happen.”
Watch Video “Cilian Murphy Spends a Lot of Time for the Role of ‘Oppenheimer'”
(afr/afr)
2023-07-31 01:20:07
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