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Washington DC (SPX) Nov 09, 2010 A team of Italian scientists has fired a laser beam into a hunk of glass to create what they believe is an optical analogue of the Hawking radiation that many physicists expect is emitted by black holes. Although the laser experiment superficially bears little resemblance to ultra-dense black holes, the mathematical theories used to describe both are similar enough that confirmation of laser-induced Hawking radiation would bolster confidence that black holes also emit Hawking radiation. When Stephen Hawking first predicted the radiation bearing his name in 1974, he hypothesized that photons could be spontaneously generated from the vacuum at the edge of a black hole. However, Hawking radiation emitted from a black hole would be so weak that many scientists believe it to be nearly impossible to detect. Scientists have turned to lasers before in attempts to create Hawking radiation, but have had difficulty isolating Hawking radiation from other forms of light emitted during experiments. Franco Belgiorno et al. combined a tunable laser beam with a bulk glass target, which allowed them to limit the Hawking radiation to certain wavelengths of infrared light and to capture the apparent Hawking radiation with an infrared sensitive digital camera. A paper describing the possible production of a laser induced analogue of Hawking radiation appears in the current issue of Physical Review Letters, and is the subject of a Viewpoint article by John Dudley (CNRS, France) and Dmitry Skryabin (University of Bath, UK) in this week's edition of Physics.
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Extreme X-ray Source Supports New Class Of Black HoleLeicester, UK (SPX) Sep 09, 2010 A group of international astronomers in the UK, France and the USA, led by the University of Leicester, have found proof to confirm the distance and brightness of the most extreme ultra-luminous X-ray source, which may herald a new type of Black Hole. The X-ray source, HLX-1, is the most extreme member of an extraordinary class of objects - the ultra-luminous X-ray sources - and is located ... read more |
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