Black Holes: The Key to Understanding the Universe

Начало книги

‘A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, of the manifestations of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty – it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute the truly religious attitude; in this sense, and in this alone, I am a deeply religious man.’

Albert Einstein

At the heart of the Milky Way, there is a distortion in the fabric of the Universe caused by something 4 million times more massive than our Sun. Space and time are so warped in its vicinity that light rays are trapped if they venture closer than 12 million kilometres. The region of no return is bounded by an event horizon, so named because the Universe outside is forever isolated from anything that happens within. Or so we used to think when the name was coined. We have named it Sagittarius A* and it is a supermassive black hole.*

Black holes lie where the most massive stars used to shine, at the centres of galaxies and at the edge of our current understanding. They are naturally occurring objects, inevitable creations of gravity if too much matter collapses into a small enough space. And yet, although our laws of Nature predict them, they fail to fully describe them. Physicists spend their careers looking for problems, conducting experiments in search of anything that cannot be explained by the known laws. The wonderful thing about the increasing number of black holes we have discovered dotted across the sky is that each one is an experiment conducted by Nature that we cannot explain. This means we are missing something deep.

Читать дальше →