Science and Technology
In news: Researchers have used complex models of the Milky Way galaxy to map out the locations of neutron stars and black holes that were created by long-dead stars.
- The researchers carefully recreated the full lifecycle of these ancient star corpses to construct the first detailed map of the “galactic underworld”.
About:
- The compact remnants of dead stars show a fundamentally different distribution and structure to the visible galaxy.
- The Milky Way’s ‘galactic graveyard’ stretches three times the height of the galaxy itself, while one-third of the neutron stars and black holes have been flung out of the galaxy.
How are Black holes formed:
- Black holes and neutron stars are formed when stars which are more than eight times larger than our Sun exhaust their fuel supply and suddenly collapse.
- When this happens, it triggers a reaction that blows apart the outer portion of the star in a supernova explosion.
- Meanwhile, the core keeps compressing itself until it becomes either a neutron star or a black hole, depending on its starting mass.
- Supernova explosions are asymmetric, and the remnants are ejected at high speed – up to millions of kilometres per hour – and, even worse, this happens in an unknown and random direction for every object.
- Neutron stars have cores so dense that electrons and protons combine at the subatomic level to form neutrons. This squeezes its total mass into a sphere that is “smaller than a city.”
- If the starting mass of the star is more than 25 times that of our Sun, this collapse will continue until the core gets so dense that even light cannot escape, creating a black hole. Both kinds of stellar remnants warp space, time and matter around them due to their density.
Source: Indian Express
Previous Year Question
Q.1) Recently, Scientists observed the merger of giant blackholes’ billions of light-years away from the Earth. What is the significance of this observation?(2019)
- ‘Higgs boson particles’ were detected.
- ‘Gravitational waves’ were detected.
- Possibility of inter-galactic space travel through ‘wormhole’ was confirmed.
- It enabled the scientists to understand ‘singularity’.
