By: Mikenzie Hammel

BLACK HOLES

WHAT ARE BLACK HOLES?

A black hole is a cold remnant of former stars. It’s a space where gravity pulls so much that even light can’t get out. The gravity is so strong because matter has been squeezed into a tiny space. Because no light can get out, people can’t see black holes. They are invisible.

In order to be pulled into a black hole, planets, light, and other materials must pass close to it. When they reach a point of no escape, they’re are said to have entered the event horizon. For any hope of escape from this point on, you would have to move faster than the speed of light.

A simulated event in the Compact Muon Soleniod (CMS) detector, also known as a physic detector, a collision in which a micro black hole may be

created.- Wikipedia

HOW ARE BLACK HOLES FORMED?

When giant stars come to the last phases in their lives, they generally explode in supernovae. This explosion distributes most of the star into space, but also leaving behind a vast “cold” piece of itself.

After the explosion occurs, the rest of the dead supernova doesn’t defy gravity so the star collapses in upon itself. Since there is nothing to oppose gravity, a black hole shrinks so that there is no volume whatsoever and the star’s own light becomes trapped in an orbit.

Hubble Space telescope image of supernova

remnant.-NASA

LIFE SPAN OF A BLACK HOLE

Many people would think that a black hole can last forever, but that is not true. Black holes do die out.

The length of their lives depend on the size they are. They slowly evaporate by the release of radiation.

Did you know: Even a small black hole the same size of the sun can last more than one billion^6 (to the 6th power) times the age of our universe!

Astronomers think the object shown in this Chandra X-ray Observatory image may be an

elusive intermediate-mass black hole.

-National Geographic

WHAT ARE BLACK HOLES CAPABLE OF? Black holes can pull in mass from a star close or next to them. This helps expand the

black hole and allows the star to shrink until it completely disappears.

If you are being pulled into a super-mass black hole, your feet and head will be stripped from your body with a force that is hundreds of millions of times stronger than earth’s gravity. So basically you’d be stretched into a long, thin strand and then be shredded.

Astronomers using European Southern Observatory (ESO) Very Large Telescope have detected a stellar-mass black hole much farther away than any other previously known in a spiral galaxy called NGC 300,

six million light-years from Earth.-The Daily Galaxy

TYPES OF BLACK HOLES

From what we know, there might be three different forms of black holes. Stellar Black Holes: are formed when a massive star collapses.

Super-massive Black Holes: can have a mass equal to billions of suns. They most likely exist in the center of galaxies including our own, the Milky Way. Because of the black hole’s placement, they tend to grow fairly quickly because of the neighboring stars and gas clouds which is the diet of the black hole.

Miniature Black Holes: have never actually been discovered yet, but would have a mass smaller than our sun.

The super-massive black hole at the center of our Galaxy was 100 million times more powerful about two million years ago.

-Archaeology

HOW CAN WE SEE BLACK HOLES?

Since black holes cannot be seen, scientists use special tools to detect the strong gravity and how it affects the stars and gas around a potential black hole. When a black hole and a star are close in distance, high-energy light is created. Human eyes are incapable of seeing this light so scientists use satellites and telescopes in space to capture it with pictures.

Keck telescopes observe the center of

our galaxy-UCLA Newsroom

Swift satellite discovers rare X-ray Nova and a black hole-The Daily Journalist

WHEN AND WHO FIRST DISCOVERED BLACK HOLES?

The first object to be named a black hole was the X-ray binary star, Cygnus X-1. Its neighboring star was being affected to where it told more about the black hole. This information was that its mass was too high for it to be even a neutron star.

These studies were confirmed two years after American astronomer, John Wheeler, came up with the expression, black hole.

-John Wheeler

CAN BLACK HOLES DESTROY EARTH?

Situation: If the sun was to replace itself with a black hole its same mass.

In this situation most people would think that the earth and all the other planets in the Milky Way would be sucked into the black hole and never return, but you have to remember the gravitational pull you feel from an object depends on the mass of it, so if the black hole is the same mass as the sun, we’d feel the same pull as if the sun wasn’t replaced in the first place.

Which, in simpler terms, the earth would orbit the black hole as smoothly as it orbits the sun now. The only downside is we’d freeze to death.

-Andrew Hamilton’s Homepage(Computer Work)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i0cVdPHOIxw

To watch Stephen Hawking’s Black Hole Time Travel Video, click on the link below.

BIBLIOGRAPHY NASA Wikipedia National Geographic Ask.com Discovery HubbleSite Google Images Daily Galaxy Archaeology UCLA Newsroom Daily Journalist Andrew Hamilton The Guardian