Black Holes - Brilliant but Deadly
Black holes! You know ‘em, you love ‘em. What’s not to like about giant vacuums that turn you into a spaghetti noodle if you get too close?
In more scientific terms, black holes are a huge amount of matter packed into a very small space. The result is a gravitational pull that’s so strong that nothing can escape, not even light.
But how do they happen?
If a star is big enough (around 3 times the size of the sun), nothing can keep it from collapsing under the influence of gravity, causing a supernova explosion. At one point, the surface of the star will reach the “event horizon.” When it reaches this point, time on the star slows and literally stops.
Then, because time is standing still, the star can’t collapse any further. It remains frozen in the middle of caving in on itself and becomes a black hole.
Types of black holes
There are 2 major kinds of black holes: stellar mass and supermassive.
Stellar mass black holes are the average Joes of black holes. They are the remnants of massive stars and are all over the universe. In fact, scientists predict that there are ten million to a billion stellar mass black holes in the Milky Way alone.
Image courtesy of nasa
On the other end of the spectrum of giant space vacuums, supermassive black holes are millions, if not billions of times as massive as the Sun. Astronomers believe that supermassive black holes are at the centre of almost all large galaxies, including our own.
The formation of supermassive black holes is theorized to be a chain reaction of collisions of stars that results in extremely huge stars, which promptly collapse to form medium-sized black holes. All these black holes gravitate towards the centre of the galaxy and merge together to create a supermassive black hole.
So, there’s only two sizes of black holes with no in between? Well, that’s what scientists thought until recently.
The newly discovered mid-mass black hole has the mass of about 500 to 1000 Suns, and kind of wrecked a bunch of theories about the formation of black holes.
What’s inside?
The center of a black hole is called the singularity. It doesn’t really exist.
I want to call it the point of no return to be dramatic, but honestly if you’re anywhere near a black hole, you’ve already reached that point.
The singularity is the place where matter sucked into the black hole is compressed down to an infinitely tiny point… theoretically.
Or it could be where matter gets squished into the smallest possible volume, a Planck length. Everything that has ever entered the black hole gets compressed into a microscopic ball… theoretically.
Black holes could be filled with dark energy—the stuff that causes the universe to expand. As things get sucked in, they can’t actually get past the event horizon because of all that dark energy and instead remains on the surface… theoretically.
All this to say, we don’t know for sure what’s inside of black holes. I mean, it’s not like we can send someone inside to go check.
Rotating Black Holes
All of the fun stuff I’ve mentioned already are about boring, stationary black holes, but rotating black holes are where things get beyond cool (if the theories are correct, that is).
Image courtesy of pixabay
The spin of a rotating black hole turns the singularity into a ring. Once you pass through the ring, you enter a real-life wormhole that spits you out into an entirely different part of the universe.
Of course, if you were to encounter the inside of a rotating black hole, you would be faced with a wall of infinitely energetic radiation.
The black hole is pulling radiation in, but the rotation speed of the singularity ring pushes the radiation back. The turning point is called the inner horizon.
That’s the entire past history of the universe blasted into your face in less than a second!
Too bad you’ll be too busy being a noodle to notice.
Sources
https://science.nasa.gov/astrophysics/focus-areas/black-holes
JAX YOUNG — Space enthusiast here to take you on a tour of the cosmos. Gets emotionally attached to Mars rovers. Virgo.