Sandia National Laboratories: News Releases : Black hole models contradicted by hands-on tests at Sandia’s Z machine
https://share-ng.sandia.gov/news/resources/news_releases/black_hole/#.WaRlmTOg9hE
A long-standing but unproven assumption about the X-ray spectra of black holes in space has been
contradicted by hands-on experiments performed at Sandia National Laboratories’ Z machine.
Z, the most energetic laboratory X-ray source on Earth, can duplicate the X-rays surrounding black
holes that otherwise can be watched only from a great distance and then theorized about.
“Of course, emission directly from black holes cannot be observed,” said Sandia researcher and lead
author Guillaume Loisel, lead author for a paper on the experimental results, published in August
in Physical Review Letters. “We see emission from surrounding matter just before it is consumed by
the black hole. This surrounding matter is forced into the shape of a disk, called an accretion disk.”
The results suggest revisions are needed to models previously used to interpret emissions from matter
just before it is consumed by black holes, and also the related rate of growth of mass within the black
holes. A black hole is a region of outer space from which no material and no radiation (that is, X-rays,
visible light, and so on) can escape because the gravitational field of the black hole is so intense.