What's the deal with black holes?

Question

just wondering the basics. like what happens when you go in one, what causes them, how do they end, just general stuff. thanks!

Answer 1

When a star at least 4 times the mass of our Sun ends its life cycle, it will supernova (our Sun will not). The remaining mass has a very strong gravity. So strong that it collapses into itself. The same holds true for Neutron Stars which are 2 to 3 times the mass of our Sun except the gravitation of the remaining mass only collapses to the degree that neutrons still support the core. It takes a speed of 1/2 the speed of light to escape from a neutron star. The size of a typical neutron star is around 20km diameter. It is very compact.

In the case of a black hole, the gravity causes the core to collapse even further. To the quark level or possibly beyond. Because it is so extremely difficult to study black holes and because our current mathematics and physics do not yet know the formulas to properly compute them, we do not know the diameter of a black hole. We only assume that it is smaller than a neutron star. Perhaps much smaller. We are still learning about the internal structure of atoms.

Black holes are said to have an immense gravitational field. This is due to its small core size. We do not know the escape velocity of a black hole's gravitational field. We do know that it is faster than the speed of light.

Besides the core of a black hole which is called its singularity, it has an area extending outwards around it called the event horizon. This can extend millions of miles from the core depending upon what the mass of the black hole is or was after it supernovaed. Once an object enters this event horizon, it can no longer escape the gravitational pull of the black hole core.

Upon entering the event horizon, objects are spaghettified. Nothing survives this. Objects are stretched and destroyed. Persons entering the event horizon would suffer a horrific death. The object (or now the objects atoms) now become a part of the black hole core.

It was once fictionalized that black holes could be some sort of transport to another dimension or function as a time warp portal but this was early when black holes were first theorized and very little was known about them. Today, you can still see this fiction in sci fi books and movies but there is no truth to it whatsoever. Of course, you will still find persons unwilling to get over the imaginative fantasy of black holes but they are only suffering from delusion and lack of education.

Black holes are often misunderstood when it comes to their gravity. If we imagine our Sun becomming a black hole (which it never will because it lacks the mass), then its core would be small and it would have an event horizon. However, its mass stays the same. In fact, it would have lost some mass in the supernova explosion. So again contrary to science fiction books and movies, it does not start sucking things into it. In the example of our Sun becoming a black hole, nothing in our Solar System would change. Yes, the planets would have gotten blasted from the supernova debris but speaking in terms of gravity, nothing has changed. All of the planets would continue revolving the black hole as if it were still our Sun. Even the planet Mercury would continue to revolve around the new black hole.

There is no need to irrationally fear a black hole. It has no more gravity than it had when it was a star. It is only spoken to have immense gravity because of its small size.

Black holes seem to live as long as matter can be acrued into it. Once this 'feeding' of nearby dust and gas ends, the black hole begins to 'die'. It very slowly releases its energy in a form of radiation known as Hawking radiation.

When black holes are studied in a rational scientific way, there is nothing mysterious about them. They are a collapsed star. In fact the proper name of black holes was black star or dark star until 1964 when a scientist gave them the name of black hole and suddenly fiction writers dreamed up anything imaginable.

It is believed that the first stars created in the Universe were more massive than the average ones today. These original stars would have supernovaed and become black holes. Today, there is no evidence of these first generation of stars. This leads to the conclusion that black holes do not live in a black hole state forever but do in fact dissipate in time by expelling their energy as radiation until nothing is left of them.

Answer 2

If a black hole could exist it would be a 2 solar mass sphere about 3 km in diameter whose surface gravity was such that the surface escape velocity would be greater than the speed of light.

  Since no light or electro magnetism could radiate from the surface it would be invisible.

  You could detect it since it would act like any other celestial body,and would likely have other bodies or planets orbiting it.

Answer 3

i think it's a conclusion based on observation and may include some untestable info or opinions.

Answer 4

A black hole is a region of space in which the gravitational field is so powerful that nothing, not even light, can escape its pull after having fallen past its event horizon. The term "Black Hole" comes from the fact that, at a certain point, even electromagnetic radiation (e.g. visible light) is unable to break away from the attraction of these massive objects. This renders the hole's interior invisible or, rather, black like the appearance of space itself.

Answer 5

Dont know if you tried the obvious already, but there's practically a book about the subject on Wikipedia.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_hole