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A black hole is a region of spacetime where gravity is so strong that nothing, including light and other electromagnetic waves, is capable of possessing enough energy to escape it. Einstein's theory of general relativity predicts that a sufficiently compact mass can deform spacetime to form a black hole. The boundary of no escape is called the event horizon. A black hole has a great effect on the fate and circumstances of an object crossing it, but it has no locally detectable features according to general relativity. In many ways, a black hole acts like an ideal black body, as it reflects no light. Quantum field theory in curved spacetime predicts that event horizons emit Hawking radiation, with the same spectrum as a black body of a temperature inversely proportional to its mass. This temperature is of the order of billionths of a kelvin for stellar black holes, making it essentially impossible to observe directly.
A neutron star is the collapsed core of a massive supergiant star. The stars that later collapse into neutron stars have a total mass of between 10 and 25 solar masses (M☉), possibly more if the star was especially rich in elements heavier than hydrogen and helium. Except for black holes, neutron stars are the smallest and densest known class of stellar objects. Neutron stars have a radius on the order of 10 kilometers (6 mi) and a mass of about 1.4 M☉. They result from the supernova explosion of a massive star, combined with gravitational collapse, that compresses the core past white dwarf star density to that of atomic nuclei.
In gamma-ray astronomy, gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) are immensely energetic explosions that have been observed in distant galaxies, described by NASA as "the most powerful class of explosions in the universe". They are the most energetic and luminous electromagnetic events since the Big Bang. Bursts can last from ten milliseconds to several hours. After an initial flash of gamma rays, a longer-lived "afterglow" is usually emitted at longer wavelengths.
Cygnus X-1 (abbreviated Cyg X-1) is a galactic X-ray source in the constellation Cygnus and was the first such source widely accepted to be a black hole. It was discovered in 1965 during a rocket flight and is one of the strongest X-ray sources detectable from Earth, producing a peak X-ray flux density of 2.3×10−23 W/(m2⋅Hz) (2.3×103 jansky). It remains among the most studied astronomical objects in its class. The compact object is now estimated to have a mass about 21.2 times the mass of the Sun and has been shown to be too small to be any known kind of normal star or other likely object besides a black hole. If so, the radius of its event horizon has 300 km "as upper bound to the linear dimension of the source region" of occasional X-ray bursts lasting only for about 1 ms.
X-ray binaries are a class of binary stars that are luminous in X-rays. The X-rays are produced by matter falling from one component, called the donor, to the other component, called the accretor, which is either a neutron star or black hole. The infalling matter releases gravitational potential energy, up to 30 percent of its rest mass, as X-rays. The lifetime and the mass-transfer rate in an X-ray binary depends on the evolutionary status of the donor star, the mass ratio between the stellar components, and their orbital separation.
A quark star is a hypothetical type of compact, exotic star, where extremely high core temperature and pressure have forced nuclear particles to form quark matter, a continuous state of matter consisting of free quarks.
In astronomy, the term compact object refers collectively to white dwarfs, neutron stars, and black holes. It could also include exotic stars if such hypothetical, dense bodies are confirmed to exist. All compact objects have a high mass relative to their radius, giving them a very high density, compared to ordinary atomic matter.
An intermediate-mass black hole (IMBH) is a class of black hole with mass in the range 102–105 solar masses: significantly more than stellar black holes but less than the 105–109 solar mass supermassive black holes. Several IMBH candidate objects have been discovered in the Milky Way galaxy and others nearby, based on indirect gas cloud velocity and accretion disk spectra observations of various evidentiary strength.
A stellar black hole is a black hole formed by the gravitational collapse of a star. They have masses ranging from about 5 to several tens of solar masses. They are the remnants of supernova explosions, which may be observed as a type of gamma ray burst. These black holes are also referred to as collapsars.
Messier 32 is a dwarf "early-type" galaxy about 2,650,000 light-years (810,000 pc) from the Solar System, appearing in the constellation Andromeda. M32 is a satellite galaxy of the Andromeda Galaxy (M31) and was discovered by Guillaume Le Gentil in 1749.
47 Tucanae or 47 Tuc is a globular cluster located in the constellation Tucana. It is about 4.45 ± 0.01 kpc (15,000 ± 33 ly) from Earth, and 120 light years in diameter. 47 Tuc can be seen with the naked eye, with an apparent magnitude of 4.1. It appears about 44 arcminutes across including its far outreaches. Due to its far southern location, 18° from the south celestial pole, it was not catalogued by European astronomers until the 1750s, when the cluster was first identified by Nicolas-Louis de Lacaille from South Africa.
An astrophysical jet is an astronomical phenomenon where outflows of ionised matter are emitted as extended beams along the axis of rotation. When this greatly accelerated matter in the beam approaches the speed of light, astrophysical jets become relativistic jets as they show effects from special relativity.
An exotic star is a hypothetical compact star composed of exotic matter, and balanced against gravitational collapse by degeneracy pressure or other quantum properties.
The Tolman–Oppenheimer–Volkoff limit is an upper bound to the mass of cold, non-rotating neutron stars, analogous to the Chandrasekhar limit for white dwarf stars. Stars more massive than the TOV limit collapse into a black hole. The original calculation in 1939, which neglected complications such as nuclear forces between neutrons, placed this limit at approximately 0.7 solar masses (M☉). Later, more refined analyses have resulted in larger values.
Westerlund 1 is a compact young super star cluster about 3.8 kpc away from Earth. It is thought to be the most massive young star cluster in the Milky Way, and was discovered by Bengt Westerlund in 1961 but remained largely unstudied for many years due to high interstellar absorption in its direction. In the future, it will probably evolve into a globular cluster.
GCIRS 13E is an infrared and radio object near the Galactic Center. It is believed to be a cluster of hot massive stars, possibly containing an intermediate-mass black hole (IMBH) at its center.
Stellar rotation is the angular motion of a star about its axis. The rate of rotation can be measured from the spectrum of the star, or by timing the movements of active features on the surface.
Gamma-ray burst progenitors are the types of celestial objects that can emit gamma-ray bursts (GRBs). GRBs show an extraordinary degree of diversity. They can last anywhere from a fraction of a second to many minutes. Bursts could have a single profile or oscillate wildly up and down in intensity, and their spectra are highly variable unlike other objects in space. The near complete lack of observational constraint led to a profusion of theories, including evaporating black holes, magnetic flares on white dwarfs, accretion of matter onto neutron stars, antimatter accretion, supernovae, hypernovae, and rapid extraction of rotational energy from supermassive black holes, among others.
Asteroseismology studies the internal structure of the Sun and other stars using oscillations. These can be studied by interpreting the temporal frequency spectrum acquired through observations. In the same way, the more extreme neutron stars might be studied and hopefully give us a better understanding of neutron-star interiors, and help in determining the equation of state for matter at nuclear densities. Scientists also hope to prove, or discard, the existence of so-called quark stars, or strange stars, through these studies. Fundamental information can be obtained of the General Relativity Theory by observing the gravitational radiation from oscillating neutron stars.
A hypernova is a very energetic supernova which is believed to result from an extreme core-collapse scenario. In this case, a massive star collapses to form a rotating black hole emitting twin astrophysical jets and surrounded by an accretion disk. It is a type of stellar explosion that ejects material with an unusually high kinetic energy, an order of magnitude higher than most supernovae, with a luminosity at least 10 times greater. Hypernovae release so much of gamma rays they usually appear similar to a type Ic supernova, but with unusually broad spectral lines indicating an extremely high expansion velocity. Hypernovae are one of the mechanisms for producing long gamma ray bursts (GRBs), which range from 2 seconds to over a minute in duration. They have also been referred to as superluminous supernovae, though that classification also includes other types of extremely luminous stellar explosions that have different origins.
References
- ↑
- Miller, J. C.; Shahbaz, T.; Nolan, L. A. (1998). "Are Q-stars a serious threat for stellar-mass black hole candidates?". Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. 294 (2): L25–L29. arXiv: astro-ph/9708065 . Bibcode:1998MNRAS.294L..25M. doi:10.1046/j.1365-8711.1998.01384.x.
- 1 2 Kusenko, Alexander (2006). Properties and signatures of supersymmetric Q-balls. workshop on Exotic Physics with Neutrino Telescopes. Uppsala, Sweden. arXiv: hep-ph/0612159 . Bibcode:2006hep.ph...12159K.
