The search for the ‘theory of everything’ is the goal to be achieved in this type of experimentation.
If we might travel through space with the ease that actors and actresses do in movies and series, we would surely find planets, stars, asteroids and other celestial bodies of unimaginable beauty, although now we have to use telescopes like NuSTAR capable of X-raying outer space. However, we would also have to deal with cosmic events of a devastating nature, such as the famous black holes. Go ahead that we are not scientists and that our articles have a mere informative purpose, but the experiment that we will talk regarding next seems to be really exceptional.
Scientists have managed to simulate the event horizon of a black hole
And group of scientistsled by PhD student Lotte Mertens, from the University of Amsterdam, have published research in Physical Review Research where claim to have simulated the event horizon of a black holehaving been able to observe what is called Hawking radiation. Until a few decades ago, it was thought that nothing might escape these cosmic phenomena, but Stephen Hawking assured that radiation might indeed be released from them, being capable of emitting energy, losing matter, or even disappearing.
First simulation of a black hole, published in 1979. Wikimedia Commons
This research might serve as the basis for the expected unification of the theory of relativitywhich studies gravity as a deformation in the geometry of space-time, and quantum mechanics, that part of physics that studies nature at very small scales, including atomic and subatomic systems. The quantum gravity theoryif it can be called that way, might begin to come to light with simulations of black holes made in laboratories. Obviously, these phenomena, much less artificial, do not exist within our planet.
Black hole simulations are nothing new to science, but these scientists have done something different. He has recreated a chain of atomswhich serves as a path for electrons move from one position to another. By being able to handle the ease with which electrons ‘jump’ in position, it has been possible to recreate a false event horizonwhat interfered with the wave nature of the electrons. It is here where there was an increase in temperature, which is consistent with what is expected in a black hole. In statements published in the research team of scientiststhey ensure that:
This may open the door to exploring fundamental aspects of quantum mechanics along with gravity and the curvature of spacetime in various settings of condensed matter physics.