(If all of this is unsatisfying, know that it keeps scientists awake at night, too.) How do black holes form? “Maybe there’s a little nugget left behind containing all of the information that fell into the black hole, maybe there’s a portal to a new universe, maybe the information is just gone forever we simply don’t know,” said Holz. What will it look like when that happens? That’s another big mystery. Scientists think that black holes eventually will explode, but it will take many, many times longer than the current age of the universe for that to happen. However, we don't yet have a quantum theory of gravity (or, at least, one capable of reliably making such predictions), so we just don't know the correct description of the singularity-or even whether it really is a singularity,” said University of Chicago Prof. “Very near the singularity, one would expect quantum effects to become important. But as you get close to the singularity itself, we lose the ability to even predict what it looks like. We have a good understanding of what the event horizon looks like, thanks to the laws of general relativity.
That’s the word we use to describe a point that is infinitely small and infinitely dense. And then, at the center, is the singularity. There is the event horizon, which you can think of as the surface, though it’s simply the point where the gravity gets too strong for anything to escape. “There are not many cases in physics where we simply cannot predict what happens, but this is one of them.”īlack holes have two parts. “In some ways that’s one of the most profound questions in physics,” said University of Chicago Prof. From that signal, we can tell how massive the black holes were, how far away they were, and how fast they were traveling when they collided. That’s how Nobel Prize winner Andrea Ghez and her team detected the supermassive black hole at the center of our own galaxy.īy detecting the gravitational ripples when they collide. We can also detect black holes by detecting the ripples in space-time created when two of them crash into each other. From this, we can calculate exactly how heavy that black hole must be.
SPACE BLACK HOLE PATCH
For example, a black hole’s gravity is so strong that nearby stars will orbit around them, so we can look for stars behaving strangely around a patch of “empty” space.
(That’s how the Event Horizon Telescope took its famous first images of black holes.) Scientists hope to use this method to learn a lot more about how and what black holes “eat.”īy seeing their gravity pulling on other things.We can find black holes by watching the movements of visible objects around them.
But we have developed several ways to find them anyway.īy looking for the stuff that’s falling in.If material is falling into a black hole, it travels at such high speeds that it gets hot and glows very brightly, and we can detect that. Scientists think they can tell us much more about these and other essential rules of the universe.Īnd on a more personal level, the supermassive black hole at the center of our own Milky Way galaxy may have played a role in how Earth came to be here! What do black holes look like?īlack holes themselves are invisible-they emit virtually no light and so cannot be seen directly. For example, black holes have helped us test Einstein’s theory of general relativity, which describes how mass, space, and time are related to one another. In the past decade, scientists have detected the signals of their collisions and taken images of the light from the gas swirling around them-and this has helped us learn many things about the universe. If you packed more and more mass into the same tiny space, eventually it would create gravity so strong that it would exert a significant pull on passing rays of light.īlack holes are created when massive stars collapse at the end of their lives (and perhaps under other circumstances that we don’t know about yet.) One of the first steps toward the discovery of black holes was made by University of Chicago Professor and Nobel laureate Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, when he realized that massive stars would have to collapse after they ran out of fuel for the fusion reactions which keep them hot and bright. When you pick up a bowling ball, it’s heavy because the matter is densely packed. What do scientists still not know about black holes?īlack holes are made of matter packed so tightly that gravity overwhelms all other forces.How was the first picture of a black hole taken?.What do black holes tell us about the universe?.
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