Black holes are some of the strangest and most fascinating objects found in outer space. They are objects of extreme density, with such strong gravitational attraction that even light cannot escape from their grasp if it comes near enough.
Stellar black holes — small but deadly
When a star burns through the last of its fuel, it may find itself collapsing. For smaller stars, up to about three times the sun's mass, the new core will be a neutron star or a white dwarf. But when a larger star collapses, it continues to fall in on itself to create a stellar black hole.
Black holes formed by the collapse of individual stars are (relatively) small, but incredibly dense. Such an object packs three times or more the mass of the sun into a city-sized range. This leads to a crazy amount of gravitational force pulling on objects around it. Black holes consume the dust and gas from the galaxy around them, growing in size.
This artist's conception of Cygnus X-1 shows the black hole drawing material from companion star (right) into a hot, swirling disk.CREDIT: Chandra X-Ray Observatory, NASA
Supermassive black holes — the birth of giants
Small black holes populate the universe, but their cousins, supermassive black holes, dominate. Supermassive black holes are millions or even billions of times as massive as the sun, but have a radius similar to that of Earth's closest star. Such black holes are thought to lie at the center of pretty much every galaxy, including the Milky Way.
Scientists aren't certain how such large black holes spawn. Once they've formed, they can easily gather mass from the dust and gas around them, material that is plentiful in the center of galaxies, allowing them to grow to enormous sizes. [Photos: Black Holes of the Universe]
Supermassive may be the result of hundreds or thousands of tiny black holes that merge together. Large gas clouds could also be responsible, collapsing together and rapidly accreting mass. A third option is the collapse of a stellar cluster, a group of stars all falling together. [Images: The Big Bang & Early Universe]
Intermediate black holes – stuck in the middle
Scientists once thought black holes came in only small and large sizes, but recent research has revealed the possibility for the existence of midsize, or intermediate, black holes. Such bodies could form when stars in a cluster collide in a chain reaction. Several of these forming in the same region could eventually fall together in the center of a galaxy and create a supermassive black hole. [What's at the Center of Black Holes?]
Black hole theory — how they tick
Black holes are incredibly massive, but cover only a small region. Because of the relationship between mass and gravity, this means they have an extremely powerful gravitational force. Virtually nothing can escape from them — under classical physics, even light is trapped by a black hole.
Simulated view of a black hole in front of the Large Magellanic Cloud.CREDIT: Alain R. | Wikimedia Commons
Such a strong pull creates an observational problem when it comes to black holes — scientists can't "see" them the way they can see stars and other objects in space. Instead, scientists must rely on the radiation that is emitted as dust and gas are drawn into the dense creatures. Supermassive black holes, lying in the center of a galaxy, may find themselves shrouded by the dust and gas thick around them, which can block the tell-tale emissions.
Sometimes as matter is drawn toward a black hole, it ricochets off of the event horizon and is hurled outward, rather than being tugged into the maw. Bright jets of material traveling at near-relativistic speeds are created. Although the black hole itself remains unseen, these powerful jets can be viewed from great distances.
Black holes have three "layers" — the outer and inner event horizon and the singularity.
The event horizon of a black hole is the boundary around the mouth of the black hole where light loses its ability to escape. Once a particle crosses the event horizon, it cannot leave. Gravity is constant across the event horizon.
The inner region of a black hole, where its mass lies, is known as its singularity, the single point in space-time where the mass of the black hole is concentrated.
Under the classical mechanics of physics, nothing can escape from a black hole. However, things shift slightly when quantum mechanics are added to the equation. Under quantum mechanics, for every particle, there is an antiparticle, a particle with the same mass and opposite electric charge. When they meet, particle-antiparticle pairs can annihilate one another.
If a particle-antiparticle pair is created just beyond the reach of the event horizon of a black hole, it is possible to have one drawn into the black hole itself while the other is ejected. The result is that the event horizon of the black hole has been reduced and black holes can decay, a process that is rejected under classical mechanics.
Scientists are still working to understand the equations by which black holes function.
Artist's concept of the huge black hole at the heart of the galaxy M87, the most massive known black hole to date. Gas swirls around the black hole in an accretion disk. The bright blue jet shooting from the region of the black hole is created by gas that never made it into the hole itself but was instead funneled into an energetic jet.CREDIT: Gemini Observatory/AURA illustration by Lynette Cook
Interesting facts about black holes
- If you fell into a black hole, gravity would stretch you out like spaghetti. Don't worry; your death would come before you reached singularity.
- Black holes do not "suck." Suction is caused by pulling something into a vacuum, which the massive black hole definitely is not. Instead, objects fall into them.
- Albert Einstein first predicted black holes in 1916 with his general theory of relativity.
- The term "black hole" was coined in 1967 by American astronomer John Wheeler.
- The first object considered to be a black hole is Cygnus X-1. Rockets carrying Geiger counters discovered eight new x-ray sources. In 1971, scientists detected radio emission coming from Cygnus X-1, and a massive hidden companion was found and identified as a black hole.
- Cygnus X-1 was the subject of a 1974 friendly wager between Stephen Hawking and a fellow physicistKip Thorne, with Hawking betting that the source was not a black hole. In 1990, he conceded defeat.
- Miniature black holes may have formed immediately after the Big Bang. Rapidly expanding space may have squeezed some regions into tiny, dense black holes less massive than the sun.
- If a star passes too close to a black hole, it can be torn apart.
- Astronomers estimate there are anywhere from ten million to a billion stellar black holes, with masses roughly thrice that of the sun, in the Milky Way.
- The interesting relationship between string theory and black holes give rise to more types of massive giants than found under conventional classical mechanics.
