Today I attended a lecture on black holes via Radboud Unuiversity and provided by Prof. Dr. Peter Jonker, who is also the Project Scientist of BlackGEM (see below). The lecture started with a good overview of the special and general relativity theory in order to explain the concept of a black hole. A couple of things I will be remembering:
- nothing is moving faster then light (speed of light); when reading this different, nothing or an empty space can move faster then light.
- Accretion onto a black hole is the most efficient process for emitting energy from matter in the Universe, releasing up to 40% of the rest mass energy of the material falling in. As a comparison, nuclear fision and fusion convert mass into energy by 0.08% & 0.7%
- Accretion onto a black hole is the most efficient process for emitting energy from matter in the Universe, releasing up to 40% of the rest mass energy of the material falling in. As a comparison, nuclear fision and fusion convert mass into energy by 0.08% & 0.7%
- when a star has a mass so large that the escape velocity exceeds the speed of light, it's called a dark star according newtonian laws; the same dark star is described as a "hole" when applying general relativity by introducing space-time curvature.
BlackGEM is a wide-field telescope array, located ar ESA La Silla Chile, dedicated to measure the optical emission from pairs of merging neutron stars and black holes. BlackGEM will be triggered by the Advanced LIGO & Virgo gravitational wave detectors. ic.
BlackGEM will start with 3 telescopes each 65cm diameter, and each equipped with a 110 Mpix camera, consisting of a single 10.5k x 10.5k CCD sampling the sky at 0.56 ”/pix.
