7/6/2023 0 Comments A journey into a black holeThe more mass an object has, the more gravity it has. Astronomers say that such a black hole, only several times more massive than the sun, is created when a dying, massive star explodes in a violent supernova. This artist’s illustration shows a black hole, together with its whirling disk of matter, hurtling like a cannonball through the disk of our own galaxy. Eventually, the entire mass of what’s left of the star gets squeezed into the tiniest space imaginable-forming a black hole. Then there’s an enormous explosion called a supernova, sending light and matter into space. First, the inner part of the star collapses. Scientists now are pretty sure that a black hole can form when a huge star reaches the end of its life and runs out of fuel. Astronomers finally began to detect signs of black holes in the 1980s. But no one wanted to believe it, including Einstein himself. “One of the questions we ask ourselves is, ‘What happened in the very, very earliest moments of the universe?'” he says.Ī century ago, Albert Einstein’s theory of gravitation predicted that black holes might exist. He works at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, N.J., and at the University of California, Santa Cruz. This image taken by the Chandra X-ray Observatory, shows a region at the center of our own Milky Way galaxy that appears to host a supermassive black hole.įurther research on black holes might eventually help explain how the universe began, Banks says. Some researchers even suggest that the universe was once a big ball of black holes, before there were any stars or planets. Nevertheless, new observations and thought experiments are shining light into the darkness.Īstronomers now suspect that there’s a black hole at the center of just about every galaxy in the universe. The whole idea sounds crazy, and it can be hard to wrap your head around something that seems like it should be impossible. Everything in the body would come out as nothing more than radiation and ashes.”īoth scientists and nonscientists find black holes fascinating. “It would be as if we had burned you up in a fire. “There wouldn’t be much of you that we could recognize,” Banks says. He’s a physicist who spends a lot of his time thinking about black holes and trying to understand them. “If you were to fall in, what remains of you would eventually come out as light and other particles,” says Tom Banks. Finally, you’d get pulverized into the tiniest bits imaginable. If you were to jump into a black hole (something that no one has yet figured out how to do), you’d be stretched from head to toe and squeezed from side to side into a long string of human spaghetti. The extremely high temperatures and pressures produced near the black hole would also cause some of the gas to be ejected, creating a huge galactic jet (from center to top right).ĭana Berry, Space Telescope Science Institute The black hole would pull in material from a swirling disk of nearby gas and stars. They’re like cracks in space, and they lurk all over the universe.Īn invisible, massive, spinning black hole may lie at the center of this galaxy, as shown in an artist’s illustration. Their gravity is so strong that they gobble up anything that comes near them, even stars, gas, and light. These mysterious, bizarre objects pack a huge mass into a tiny volume. There are swimming holes and buttonholes, cheese holes and bullet holes. There are all sorts of holes: big ones and little ones, deep ones and shallow ones.
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