Global Lords: I Have Information System

[This chapter is the long-awaited anti-theft chapter]

[Don’t ask me why it’s been long-awaited, because the author really can’t come up with a chapter that can be replaced]

[Original readers, stick to the routine, just refresh at 6 AM]

[Pirated readers, you’re welcome to subscribe to the original, you can actually afford a subscription by just watching ads]

[The author is working hard writing, surely you can spare time to watch an ad]

[I heard that the old grandpa next door, ever since subscribing to the original, has back pain relieved, knee pain gone, arms full of strength, and he managed to jump off the fifth floor in one go, with no trouble, and got an eighteen-year-old girlfriend the next day]

[What are you waiting for?]

[Quickly join the original family, enjoy the warmth just like at home]

Xinfan Technology News: On August 27th, in all astronomical concepts, black holes may be the most bizarre one. The density of a black hole is so high that even light cannot escape, like a terrifying dark giant. Since ordinary physical laws do not apply in black holes, they seem tailor-made for science fiction. However, numerous direct and indirect pieces of evidence show that black holes do indeed exist in the universe.

Einstein’s Prophecy

Black holes are an inevitable result of Einstein’s general relativity.

German astronomer Karl Schwarzschild first predicted the existence of black holes in 1916, considering it an inevitable result of Einstein’s general relativity. In other words, if Einstein’s theory is correct (all evidence points to this), then black holes must exist. Research by Roger Penrose and Stephen Hawking further solidified the theoretical foundation of the existence of black holes. Their research showed that any stellar collapse into a black hole would form a singularity, and all traditional physics laws fail at this point.

Gamma-Ray Bursts

The observation equipment on the ground has detected some gamma-ray bursts produced during the birth of black holes.

In the 1930s, Indian astrophysicist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar conducted research on the fate of a star after its nuclear fuel was exhausted. He found that the final outcome depends on the star’s mass. If the star is large, say about 20 times the mass of the sun, the dense core of the star (whose mass alone can be two or three times that of the sun) will continue to collapse inward until it becomes a black hole. The collapse speed of the star’s core is extremely fast, taking only a few seconds, during which it releases an astonishing amount of energy in the form of gamma-ray bursts, equivalent to the total energy released by an ordinary star over its long lifetime. Ground-based telescopes have detected multiple gamma-ray bursts, some from galaxies billions of light-years away, indicating that we have indeed observed black hole formation.

Gravitational Waves

This is a concept map of gravitational waves created by an artist. The gravitational interaction between two black holes forms ripples in space-time, which spread outward in the form of gravitational waves.

Black holes aren’t always alone; sometimes they appear in pairs, rotating around each other. The gravitational interaction between two black holes forms ripples in space-time, which spread outward in the form of gravitational waves. This is also one of the prophecies proposed by Einstein’s relativity. With the help of observatories like LIGO and Virgo, we now have the ability to detect gravitational waves. In 2016, scientists announced for the first time the discovery of gravitational waves produced by the merger of two black holes. Since then, we have detected multiple gravitational wave events. As detector precision continues to improve, scientists have also detected gravitational waves produced by other events besides black hole mergers, like black holes colliding with neutron stars.

Invisible Companion Star

This is an artist’s impression of the track of stars in the triple system HR6819.

Events that produce gamma-ray bursts or gravitational waves are high-energy occurrences that happen quickly, visible across half the universe. But given their nature, most black holes are undetectable. Black holes do not emit any light or radiation, so they can quietly lie dormant in space without astronomers realizing their presence. However, there is one method to detect their presence: using the gravitational effect black holes have on other stars. In 2020, when observing the seemingly ordinary binary star system HR6819, astronomers noticed something peculiar about the orbits of the two stars, which could only be explained by the existence of a completely invisible stellar object in the system. After calculating its mass, researchers realized the truth: it must be a black hole. It’s only a thousand light-years away from Earth, located within the Milky Way Galaxy, and is the closest black hole discovered to Earth so far.

X-ray

The black hole Cygnus X-1 is devouring a nearby massive blue companion star.

In 1971, while studying a system named Cygnus X-1 in the Milky Way Galaxy, scientists first observed evidence of black hole existence. The X-rays produced by the system are extremely bright, but they do not come from the black hole or its visible companion star, rather from an accretion disk formed as the black hole devours stellar material. Just like the previously mentioned binary system HR6819, astronomers can also estimate the mass of the invisible stellar object in the Cygnus X-1 system using the orbit of the visible star. The final calculation result is about 21 times the mass of the sun, and considering the small space occupied by this star object, it indicates that it can only be a black hole, without considering any other possibilities.

Supermassive Black Hole