A traditional January Session of the American Astronomic Society is one of the most representative forums of the kind therefore the majority of astronomers intentionally keep their discoveries for this forum. Now the “astronomic” news comes in showers. This year one of the main items of the agenda is the physics of the black holes.

The black hole is a region of space and time, in which the gravitational field is so powerful that nothing can escape even electromagnetic radiation (i.e. light).

From 1784 when the mass of the object inaccessible for visual observation was estimated for the first time by an experimental method , and until the present the theory of black holes remains rather disputable not only in the scientific community but also among men in the street. The fear of “the black uncertainty” was escalated by Hollywood that actively exploited this theme in the films about the far future.

Many serious discoveries were presented at this forum. In particular, a NASA observatory presented pictures showing how the black hole “eats” a neighbor galaxy.

However, for the Earth the probability of collision with such hole is not high. In spite of the fact that there are millions of black holes in the Universe our galaxy looks relatively quite. Besides, to eat a galaxy the black hole needs millions of years that yet are not a very long time period in the space.

Alexander Tutukov, Chief of the Star Physics and Evolution Department in the Institute of Astronomy, claims that “our galaxy is also a product of “eating”! All massive stars, which mass is 10-15-25 times more than that of the Sun, leave huge black holes behind. They appear in our galaxy approximately once in hundred years. There are millions such holes around.”

But the globalization seems much more frightening to the scientists than the black holes. They believe that the mankind may parish within thousand years e.g. from the new chemistry that aggressively enters our life. “Don’t be scared to get into the black hole – you will never notice it! “ Tutukov says.

The top new of this January Session was a communication of a group of Finnish scientists lead by Mauri Valtonen about a discovery of the largest black hole, which mass is 18 billion times more than that of the Sun and 6 times more than the previous record.

They succeeded to estimate these values with reference to “a satellite” of the record-breaker , a similar black hole located relatively close to the Earth and therefore studied well enough. By astronomic measurements both black holes located at a distance of 3.5 billion light years from the Earth in the Constellation Cancer are rather young: they are only several million years old.

This binary system of black holes is a quasar , i.e. an extremely bright active galactic nucleolus. As a rule, they are point-like but actively “turn on “ and off in the light spectrum.

The Finnish scientists came to a conclusion that this quasar reaches a peak of its radiation every 12 years, and succeeded to predict the next peak. It occurs, in the opinion of the astronomers, when a smaller black hole rotating around its neighbor crosses its accretion disk. The collision with the disk substance generates flows of glowing gas and extremely powerful flares.

However, it is impossible to see a black hole – the mass of this space object is so large that nothing can escape from its gravitational field, even light. Therefore astronomers trace black holes analyzing the trajectories of other heavenly bodies.

Not so long ago, space telescopes received data that many super massive black holes spin very rapidly. Vortex spins of these huge black holes generate powerful jets emitting huge energy around and thus affecting the growth of galaxies.

The scientists came to a conclusion that these black holes spin at a velocity close to the limit of the Einstein's relativity theory, and this means that such black holes pull the space substance in at a velocity close to the light one.

These discoveries enabled the scientists to verify the Einstein's gravitation theory in the conditions of extremely powerful gravitational interactions. In so doing, the General relativity theory was once again confirmed - the difference between the theoretically estimated masses of objects and experimentally determined values was 10 per cent maximum. The astronomers believe that if the measuring instruments of a higher accuracy are used, the error may be less.

Unfortunately, Russian astrophysicists may only dream of such discoveries. The first Russian space telescope developed in the Lavochkin Scientific-Production Association is expected to be launched in 2011. Meanwhile, our scientists have only a small quota in European telescope Integral and are not in position to conduct long-time observations.