Sandia National Laboratories - Albuquerque NM:
The Z-Machine, the powerful most man-made source of X-rays on Earth, located at Sandia National Laboratories facility in New Mexico, has recently accrued results contradictory to many theorist’s long standing beliefs regarding the source of X-rays near blackholes. (Sandia Press Release here)
The blackhole theorists have for years hypothesised that the source of the X-rays was the blackholes’ accretion disk, a place where matter being consumed in the blackhole is spirals into a flat disk as it falls toward the blackholes event horizon. At this point the immense gravitational force of the blackhole exerted on the infalling matter causes the matter to spiral faster and faster, and the matter is condensed and heats up under these enormous, crushing forces. Scientists long believed that it was at this point that the X-rays were produced, in a process they named - Resonant Auger Destruction Assumption, whereby iron was ionised but instead of emitting radiation as is usually observed when electrons drop back to lower energy states, in this process it was thought that the electrons moved away as ‘lone wolves’.
Neal Singer reported for Sandia News…
“However, Z researchers, by duplicating X-ray energies surrounding blackholes and applying them to a dime-size film of silicon at the proper densities, showed that if no photons appear, then the generating element simply isn’t there. Silicon is an abundant element in the universe and experiences the Auger effect more frequently than iron. Therefore, if Resonant Auger Destruction happens in iron then it should happen in silicon too.”
And lead author of the paper, Guillaume Loisel, said to Singer “If Resonant Auger Destruction is a factor, it should have happened in our experiment because we had the same conditions, the same column density, the same temperature, our results show that if the photons aren’t there, the ions must be not there either.”
As Singer reported, this means a rework is required to much work done on X-ray emission theories in relation to blackholes over the last twenty years.
Article by Tom Michaels, aka UberSci Like or follow at: https://facebook.com/UberSci/