Black holes are the rips in our universe. No one knows what is inside of them, especially because of their infinite gravity. We don’t have the fuel to come close to one, and even then, we would not be able to get any information to study it because of how strong a black hole is. No one has ever had the chance to even remotely study black holes, but by using the most advanced technology we have, we can finally try to observe particles that make up black holes.

Scientists from Sandia National Lab, New Mexico used the world’s most powerful radiation source to try to recreate the plasma that surrounds black holes. Plasma is a gas with an electrical charge, and when scientists studied it, they found some information that might change how most scientists perceive black holes. For some reason, when they recreated the plasma, it had different properties from the plasma from black holes. Because of black holes’ powerful gravitational force, the active galactic nuclei are surrounded by plasma, which is made up of matter that is torn up by its gravity. Active galactic nuclei is a compact disk of matter that surrounds black holes in the middle of a galaxy. They recreated the plasma by blasting silicon with pulses of high energy levels of radiation. They measured the emission of the plasma the same way you would measure any other gas, using its spectral lines. Spectral lines are lines that show how an object’s emission or absorption of light compare to the frequency of other objects. Although scientists have known for awhile that some spectral lines were missing from black holes, they still believed that some elements were just hidden from the scientists’ view.

Due to further research from scientists at the MIT Haystack Observatory, they now know that there could not be any other elements hidden since there would at least be some trace of them that any scanners would pick up on. This thus reveals that scientists’ atomic models of black holes are flawed. Mostly because scientists usually don’t realize the fact that the black holes themselves don’t make the plasma since they only help with the formation of it. Even though the experiments made proved that scientists are wrong, they also changed the way black holes will be seen by everyone. The fact that scientists could try to accurately recreate plasma is a breakthrough in the study of black holes. Now that technology is advancing very quickly, they will continue to make breakthroughs.