FRAME DRAGGING

Matter Rides Black Hole's Space-Time Wave
By Robert Roy Britt
(read the whole article here)

Black hole basics

Black holes are so dense they can trap light. They can't be seen, but astronomers find them by noting their gravitational effect on surrounding objects or by seeing X-rays and other radiation kicked up in their vicinity when gas is superheated as it swirls in at phenomenal speeds.

The infalling gas forms a thin disk, theory says. From this accretion disk come the X-rays used in the new research.

Any object with mass warps the space and time around it, in much the same way a heavy object deforms a stretched elastic sheet. Light passing by a very massive star or galaxy can be noticeably bent, for example.

Einstein's work predicts all this. But beyond Einstein, even stranger things are predicted. If an object spins, it further distorts space-time; imagine the elastic sheet being twisted by a heavy, spinning heavy.

The effect is called frame dragging. It is a modification to the simpler aspects of gravity set out by Newton. Working from Einstein's relativity theory, Austrian physicists Joseph Lense and Hans Thirring predicted frame dragging in 1918. (It is also known as the Lense-Thirring effect.)

Other studies have found evidence for spinning black holes and the warping of space-time around them. Even the rotation of Earth has been shown to distort nearby space-time, causing satellites to be dragged by 6 feet (2 meters) every year.

Frame dragging may play an important role in the twisted physics that cause black holes not just to swallow light and matter, but to spit out tremendous amounts of hot gas in high-velocity jets seen in several studies.

Please take time to read the whole article. Heck, you're at the computer, what else you gonna do? Why not fill the time with a quick and invigorating read into the world of cosmological physics.

Better yet, click HERE first and listen to a song I wrote called "FRAME DRAGGING". THEN, with the song playing (don't forget the headphones!), read the whole article from Space.com.