Comment on When the first Black Hole was discovered in 1971 what did the scientist actually think it was at first? How come now it seems that it destroys everything it ingests? Why is it not a funnel of sorts?

• Aquila@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  The gamma rays come from the super heated gas near the blackhole. That gas hasn’t crossed the event horizon yet so thats why we can still see it

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• FearMeAndDecay@literature.cafe ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  I’ll be honest, that’s one of the things I didn’t fully understand myself from the class. I tried to do a bit of reading to refresh my memory and I realized I was thinking of accretion disks, not gamma ray bursts. Black holes can emit gamma ray bursts apparently but I think they only emit it when they eat a star and the star explodes as it’s being pulled apart. So the burst we see is a part that’s still able to escape. I think

  Accretion disks though are another way we can detect blacks holes. Because of their massive gravity, black holes draw in a lot of matter that orbits it until it eventually passes the event horizon and can no longer be detected. Before that though, all the matter, whether it be gasses or parts of stars or planets that have been torn apart, rubs together and heats up, emitting light that we can detect until it eventually is pulled past the event horizon

  Like I said before, there’s still a lot we don’t know about black holes because they’re hard to find, let alone study. Honestly, the more I learned in that astronomy class, the more I realized just how much we don’t fully understand about the universe yet. We have so much left to learn and discover that it’s kind of exciting to think about what will be discovered next in our lifetime!

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