Artificial Black Hole - Made in China

[shuttler]

Artificial black hole mimics curved spacetime

Light-bending black hole mimic is first you can watch

A plastic black hole traps light just like the real deal, and is the first such structure, natural or artificial, that you can actually watch in action. Unlike the real thing, it isn't dangerous – but it is helping to demystify one of nature's weirdest objects and might even have applications for energy-harvesting devices like solar cells.

Black holes are most famous for swallowing light, or anything else in their path. But this fate only awaits objects that get sucked past a point called the event horizon.

Less well known is a black hole's photon sphere, a region of warped space-time outside the horizon that merely traps light in curved paths. Astronomers have never observed a photon sphere – even outside genuine black holes – because, by definition, trapped light can't escape and reach your eyes so you can see it.

So to visualise this process, Hui Liu at Nanjing University in China and colleagues built an artificial black hole....

Liu says the model could be used to study the effects of general relativity around a real black hole, but the ability to trap light could also have more practical applications. "It could be quite useful for solar cells, photon detectors, microlasers and many other energy harvesting devices."




More to find here：

http://www.solidot.org—— Text in Chinese

http://www.newscientist.com—— Text in English

and post #226 here

 

[elis]

send it on USA or Israël war mongers

 

[shuttler]

Re-link to the above video (post #1) which is not working now due to site construction:

Artificial black hole mimics curved spacetime

 

[bandit]

A plastic model with shining lights?

Sounds more like high school science projects

 

[armchairPrivate]

I heard about that. It is an exciting tool to have for scientific experiment, though not the real thing.

You can actually observe the event in close quarter.

 

[shuttler]

I heard about that. It is an exciting tool to have for scientific experiment, though not the real thing.

You can actually observe the event in close quarter.

Intelligent reply!
You can see the light bends and yields to the force of the aritificial "black hole" created in the lab. This is exactly what the Hubble telescope has captured on the "lensing" effect in deep space:

Mass can act like a lens: a mass like that of a star or giant planet can displace the apparent position of distant stars. Very massive objects like clumps of dark matter can be strong gravitational lenses. Weak lensing is less obvious but just as useful in “weighing” invisible dark matter. (Strong gravitational lens in Abell 2218 by Hubble Space Telescope; inset from Sean Carroll, “Spacetime and Geometry: An Introduction to General Relativity”)

More of that in here:

http://newscenter.lbl.gov/feature-stories/2009/10/27/evolving-search-3/