The Mystery of Black Holes

Scientists have said Monday that they have witnessed matter being sucked into what is assumed to be a black hole. The matter was being sucked in around 6,000,000 mph, which is equivalent to 10,000,000 kph.

Scientists from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland said that the black hole, centered in the middle of the galaxy had iron at the very edges of it. NASA's center found x-ray emissions coming from the iron. The black hole is around 100 million light-years away, A light-year is the distance light travels in a year at the speed of light, 186,000 miles per second.

Black holes are a very interesting topic in science, some are created by collapsed stars and others are "supermassive" containing as much mass as a million or billion suns compressed into a small area. The force of gravity in a black hole is too much for anything to escape, that includes light.

Scientists cannot see black holes unless they look at the accretion disks, which is the twirling matter that is around the black hole as it is being pulled in. There is a saying, "event horizon", and after the matter hits this it can no longer be seen. Using X-ray telescopes, like the one used in this case, the different kinds of energy that are let out from the matter that is swirling around the black hole can be seen.

Until now no one has seen the matter as it is being sucked into the black hole, just being bounced around in the accretion disk. Now they believe that they have finally seen it.

They looked at the galaxy of NGC 3516 with the Advanced Satellite for Cosmology and Astrophysics or ASCA, a Japanese-US X-ray satellite launched in 1993 to study the heated gas in the accretion disk. Deep in the emitted gas was a strange phenomenon, energy was "red-shifted" in a weird Doppler effect.

Like sound waves, that become louder and quieter as they approach and then fade away, light is stretched (red-shifted), as it travels away from the world. An analysis of this altered light showed the iron was moving at a portion of 6.5 million mph toward a black hole.

Of course, this is the scientists interpretation of the received data, but the evidence is still pretty good. For the first time in history, humans have been able to report finally seeing matter falling into a black hole, which there has never been any direct evidence for. Is this one step closer to finding out some of the mind boggling questions we have always had since the discovery of a black hole.