A Word from a Black Female Relativistic Astrophysicist: Setting the Record Straight on Black Holes
Date: Tue, 6 Apr 2004 21:48:57 GMT (24kb)
This Letter is written to clear up a situation, and hopefully
we will learn something from it: scientifically and morally. Herein
is presented a true ``historical'' scenario of events, that led
to my being the first person (Williams 1991) to successfully work
out the Penrose mechanism in four-dimensions (three-space momenta
and energy). Before working out a solution to the Penrose mechanism:
to extract energy from a rotating black hole, the Penrose mechanism
(since first proposed by Roger Penrose in 1969) had been attempted
by scientists over the world for nearly two decades, with little
success, although making some progress. In the Penrose analysis
of Williams (1991, 1995) details of the behavior of efficient
Penrose relativistic scattering processes in the ergosphere are
described. The reason a solution eluded other scientists before
me is that there was very little known about orbits inside the
ergosphere, where space and time are no longer separable, as measured
by an observer at infinity (i.e., far away from the Kerr black
hole). In this Letter, I describe how analytic derivations of
the conserved energy and azimuthal angular momentum of particle
orbits not confined to the equatorial plane allowed me to succeed
where others, whose ``shoulders'' I stood on, had failed. Also,
I will mention some well known scientists in the astrophysics
community by name, as I discuss their involvement, and outline
the facts behind an author feeling the need to set the record
straight.
_______________________________________
From: Reva Kay Williams <revak@astro.ufl.edu>
Date: Thu, 8 Nov 2001 17:01:06 GMT (141kb)
Authors: Reva
Kay Williams (University of Florida)
Comments: 9 Latex pp., including 3 eps figs. (aipproc.sty
macros), to appear in proceedings, 20th Texas Symposium on Relativistic
Astrophysics (10-15 December 2000), edited by J.C. Wheeler and
H. Martel, in press
For almost four decades, since the discovery of quasars, mounting observational evidence has accumulated that black holes indeed exist in nature. In this paper, I present a theoretical and numerical (Monte Carlo) fully relativistic 4-D analysis of Penrose scattering processes (Compton at radii between the marginally stable, marginally bound orbits and gamma-gamma-->$e^-e^+$ pair production at the photon orbit) in the ergosphere of a supermassive Kerr (rotating) black hole. These model calculations surprisingly reveal that the observed high energies and luminosities of quasars and other active galactic nuclei (AGNs), the collimated jets about the polar axis, and the asymmetrical jets (which can be enhanced by relativistic Doppler beaming effects) all are inherent properties of rotating black holes. From this analysis, it is shown that the Penrose scattered escaping relativistic particles exhibit tightly wound coil-like cone distributions (highly collimated vortical jet distributions) about the polar axis, with helical polar angles of escape varying from $0.5^o$ to $30^o$ for the highest energy particles. It is also shown that the gravitomagnetic (GM) field, which causes the dragging of inertial frames, exerts a force acting on the momentum vectors of the incident and scattered particles, causing the particle emission to be asymmetrical above and below the equatorial plane, thus appearing to break the equatorial reflection symmetry of the Kerr metric. This energy-momentum extraction model can be applied to any size black hole, irrespective of the mass, and therefore applies to microquasars as well.