SCIENTISTS have managed to prove that event horizons of a black hole are real and that matter disappears when it crosses such a point.
Once matter crosses the event horizon of a black hole it is unable to escape, according to boffins at the University of Texas (UoT) at Austin.
Due to the intense gravitational pull of a black hole, not even light can become freed once it passes the point of no return. Black holes DO have event horizons which devour EVERYTHING around them. The revelation goes one step further to proving Albert Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity.
Astrophysicist Pawan Kumar, from the university, said: "Our whole point here is to turn this idea of an event horizon into an experimental science, and find out if event horizons really do exist or not.
"Our motive is not so much to establish that there is a hard surface, but to push the boundary of knowledge and find concrete evidence that really, there is an event horizon around black holes.”
An artist's impression of a star impacting against a solid object
Scientists largely believe that at the heart of most galaxies lies a supermassive black hole, but one theory that is also recognized is that there might not be a black hole, but rather a ‘central massive object’ which has somehow managed to avoid collapsing in on itself to create a singularity – a point of infinite density – like how black holes are created.
To test this theory, Mr. Kumar and his team discovered that if a star was to crash into this central object, it would create intense heat that could be detected, rather than being sucked into a black hole.
"General relativity has passed another critical test."
They then scanned through data from the Pan-STARRS telescope in Hawaii to look for instances in which this could have happened, but ultimately found none, essentially disproving the central massive object theory, and proving threw event horizon one.
Team member Ramesh Narayan from Harvard University said: "Our work implies that some, and perhaps all, black holes have event horizons and that material really does disappear from the observable Universe when pulled into these exotic objects, as we've expected for decades.
"General relativity has passed another critical test."