Darkest Object In The Universe, Black Holes

Cygnus X-1: A Stellar Mass Black Hole
Source : NASA

Black holes are regions of space where the gravitational pull is so strong that nothing, not even light, can escape. Instead of empty space, black holes are filled with matter packed into tiny space.

Who Discovered Black Holes?

Schwarzschild accidentally discovered black holes in 1916 when he was discovering a particular solution to Einstein’s general theory of relativity while trying to find the solution to the gravitational attraction of a single solitary symmetrical sphere of matter, like the sun at the center of our sun system. But there was one thing about this solution: the theory behaved strangely at a certain radius, now known as the Schwarzschild radius.

It later emerged why this radio was so special. in a space smaller than this radius, its gravitational pull would overwhelm all known forces and nothing could escape. The first physicists assumed that this situation would never occur in nature. But in the late 1930s it became clear that nature could allow black holes when Indian physicist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar discovered that above a certain density, no force could overcome gravity. However, black holes can only form under the most extreme conditions.

How Are Black Holes Formed?

Formation Of Black Hole
Source : inventionsky

Stars produce light and heat due to motors in their cores, in which a process called nuclear fusion takes place. There two light atoms merge to form a heavier one. Atom, a process that releases energy. These heavier atoms then fuse into even heavier atoms and so on, so that the star produces light and heat.

When stars with a mass greater than eight times our sun melt towards the end of their life, they fuse increasingly heavier elements such as silicon and magnesium in their core and eventually begin to form iron. produces more energy than this reaction, so that nothing can counteract the gravitational pull of the star’s own mass at this point. And so the strong star collapses. With all this crushing gravity, the core of the star pushes itself past the Schwarzschild radius, where a black hole forms.

Since no known force can stop the collapse, once the material forms a black hole, it continues to push until it becomes a singularity, a point of infinite density. Around this singularity lies the event horizon. , the invisible spherical border that marks the entrance to the black hole. Once something crosses the event horizon, it can never come out. To escape one would have to travel faster than the speed of light, and since nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, this black hole meal is doomed.

Supermassive black holes, millions of times the mass of the Sun, are formed over hundreds of millions of years by feeding on the matter around them and merging with other black holes.

What Happens Inside A Black Hole?

Black holes are anything but empty space; inside one would find charges and bulk charges squeezed onto an infinitely small point. The pull of this singularity would inevitably attract any mass. No matter what you look like or how much you resist, you are guaranteed to get uniqueness in a limited time, as explained by JILA, a joint institute of the University of Colorado Boulder and the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

Physicists don’t know what’s going on at the singularity. It’s such an extreme environment that all our current knowledge of physics breaks-down.

How Do Scientists Know That Black Holes Are Real?

Despite the lack of knowledge about the bowels of a black hole, physicists know they exist. bright source of x-rays about 6,000 light years away, NASA explained. Observations of this system revealed a small, dense, dark companion, a black hole, pouring out of the atmosphere of an orbiting companion. Astronomers cannot see the black hole itself, but when the gas falls to its destination, it heats up and emits energy in the form of X-rays.

How Big Are Black Holes?

The black hole in Cygnus X1 has about 20 times the mass of the Sun, which is pretty typical of black holes in the entire universe. In our own galaxy, scientists have identified between 10 million and a billion black holes, NASA reported. The closest known black hole is Cygnus X1, which lurks just over 6,000 light years away (although there are unconfirmed black holes 1,000 light years away).

The Milky Way and at the center of almost all other galaxies is a monster, a supermassive black hole. Supermassive black holes are millions of times more massive than the sun, and some can even become hundreds of billions of times more massive than the sun. These giants grow to amazing sizes by feeding on surrounding matter and merging with other black holes over the course of hundreds of millions of years.

Black Holes Look Like?

First Ever Image Of Black Hole
(Image credit: Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration)

Black holes are just that, they are “black” in the sense that they do not emit light, but astronomers can still see them through the gravitational effects they have on other objects and their disorderly eating habits.

Some black holes, mostly supermassive ones, can be seen by astronomers because of the quasars they produce. Quasars are intensely bright sources of radio emissions. When matter falls into a black hole, it is compressed and heated into a souped-up version of Cygnus X1. that surrounds the black hole can overshadow its entire host galaxy and can fire jets of superheated particles almost at the speed of light for tens of thousands of light years, NASA said.

Another way to “see” black holes is when they merge. Black holes collide and send waves through spacetime known as gravitational waves. These waves are incredibly weak, but delicate instruments on earth are able to detect them. To date, astronomers have identified 50 black waves. Hole merge events.

The only true “picture” of a black hole ever created came about in 2019 when astronomers used the Event Horizon telescope, a network of bowls that spanned the entire earth, to image this illuminated disk of material wrapped around a hole turns. Black named M87 *, Live Science reported at the time. M87 * weighs 3 billion times more than the sun and sits in a galaxy more than 50 million light years away. In this picture, M87 * looked like a distorted orange donut. Since it is impossible to photograph the black hole yourself (because no light can escape), astronomers saw its “shadow”, the hole in the glowing matter that surrounds it.

What If You Fall Into A Black Hole?

The good news is that the nearest black holes are thousands of light years away from us. From a distance, black holes behave like any other massive object in the universe. If you were to replace the Sun with a black hole of solar mass, the Earth’s orbit would be completely unchanged (all plants would die, but that’s another problem), but near a black hole the gravitational forces are so strong that they stretch from Head to toe in a long, thin strand of particles before they reach the event horizon, a terrible fate strangely called “spaghetti“.