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Black Holes

 Black Holes

Origin

The theory of relativity, created by Albert Einstein, presented the idea of black holes, implying that a compressed mass would distort space and create a black hole. Nonetheless, it originated from a letter John Michell wrote about an object so massive that light could not escape it. Scientists began wondering if black holes existed because the math predicted them to exist, but there was no proof. We got a visual confirmation of black holes in mid-2019 when the Event Horizon Telescope collaboration (EHT) captured a blurred image of a black hole.







How a Black Hole is Formed

    When a supergiant star dies and runs out of fuel, it explodes, leaving its core. This explosion causes a supernova (not all massive stars create a supernova). The core can't resist the crushing force of its gravity, so it collapses on itself, shrinking till it is infinitely smaller than an atom. A singularity is when an object is so unimaginably small that it has no size but infinite density—a black hole. 


Features of a Black Hole

    Besides its singularity, a black hole has other attributes, such as the event horizon being a point where nothing can escape. You can't go back once you enter the event horizon, and spaghettification occurs, which stretches the object toward the black hole. The accretion disc is debris orbiting around a black hole and is the brightest object in the universe. A relativistic jet is a beam of matter shot out from a black hole going nearly the speed of light. 




Random Facts

  •     The nearest black hole known to man is Gaia BH1, which is 1,560 light-years away.
  •  There could be tens of millions of black holes in the Milky Way. Some scientists think black holes will die out because they leak heat energy. 
  • Some black holes rotate thousands of times per second. 
  • Time slows down when you're near a black hole; so many years would've passed on Earth if you had spent an hour there. 
  • There are two different types of black holes, stellar and supermassive. Stellar black holes form at the center of a dead star, while a supermassive black hole lies in the center of a galaxy. 
  • The supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way has a mass 4.6 million times that of the Sun.

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