Black Holes Essay

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According to the general relativity theory, a sufficiently compact mass has the capacity to deform spacetime thereby forming what is commonly known as a black hole, a point around which the gravitational force is too strong. Imagine a giant building, a skyscraper for example, being compacted and compressed to the size of a Rubik’s cube. This happens to the massive dying star at the end of its life. For nearly 200 years now, theorists have postulated the existence of black holes and now there is strong evidence to support that most, if not all galaxies have black holes that are essentially millions or even billions of times heavier than the sun (Volonteri, 2010). Coined in 1967 by the American Physicist John Arichbald Wheeler, the term “black hole” refers to a region of space-time from which the gravitational pull is so strong that it does not allow anything, including light, to escape (Begelman, 2003), which implies that black holes cannot be observed. In lay mans term, light cannot escape due to the fact that black hole it is travelling at the speed of light. It is as if two baseballs were thrown side by side but the observer at ball level can only see one baseball. We will explore the concept of black holes, that is, all that is currently known about this phenomenon, how they are formed, and what can be learnt from them; similarly, this essay will also highlight how black holes are detected and how they are made. The appearance of an event horizon, the boundary in space-time through which matter and light are attracted inwards towards the mass of the black hole becoming trapped permanently, is the most distinguishable feature of a black hole. As noted earlier, not even light can escape from a black hole since anything that dr... ... middle of paper ... ...the remnants of massive stars that eventually exhausted their fuel, in addition to super massive black holes at their centres. The gravitational pull around black holes is so strong that virtually nothing that enters them, including light, barely escapes and all black holes have no hair since regardless of their mass, they all can be characterized by their mass, angular momentum, as well as charge. It is difficult to study black holes because they cannot be seen but despite their invisibility, astronomers can infer the presence of black holes through their interaction with other matter as well as with electromagnetic radiation such as light; this has led to the discovery of two types of black holes, the stellar-mass black hole, which is believed to be only a few times heavier than the sun, and the super massive black hole that is about as heavy as a small galaxy.

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