Black Holes

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Black Holes

The American scientist John Wheeler coined the phrase “black hole” in 1969 to describe a massively compact star with such a strong gravitational field that light cannot escape. When a star’s central reserve of hydrogen is depleted, the star begins to die. Gravity causes the center to contract to higher and higher temperatures, while the outer regions swell up, and the star becomes a red giant. The star then evolves into a white dwarf, where most of its matter is compressed into a sphere roughly the size of Earth. Some stars continue to evolve, and their centers contract to even higher densities and temperatures until their nuclear reserves are exhausted and only their gravitational energy remain. The core then rushes inward while the mantle explodes outward, creating neutron stars in the form of rapidly rotating pulsars. Imploding stars overwhelmed by gravity form black holes, where the core hits infinite density and becomes a singularity (some estimate it at 10^94 times the density of water).

John Michell and Pierre de Laplace, in 1783, showed that when the escape speed from the surface of a body equals the speed of light, Newtonian theory breaks down. According to general relativity, spacetime is curved and the curvature is a measure of the strength of gravity. Thus as a star contracts, its surface gravity increases and spacetime becomes more curved. At the Schwartzschild radius (Rs=2GM/c^2) spacetime is so curved that the body is enclosed, becoming a black hole wrapped in curved spacetime where not even light can escape it. Also, as a mass contracts, its surface gravity increases in strength and light rays emitted from the surface are increasingly redshifted and deflected (gravitational redshift=(l...

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...ðG^2*M^2/c^4. When two black holes encounter one another, they combine to form a single black whole whose surface area is greater than the sum of the horizon areas of the two initial black holes. A black hole can never split into two black holes, since this would decrease total surface area and thus entropy. Radiating away mass, does not violate the laws of thermodynamics, since, although the black hole’s surface area decreases, the emitted radiation carries entropy into space, thus neither creating or destroying entropy within the closed system of the universe.

Bibliography

Harrison, Edward. Cosmology. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000.

Hawking, Stephen W. A Brief History of Time. Toronto: Bantam Books, 1988.

Scientific American. Cosmology +1. San Francisco: W.H. Freeman and Co., 1977.

http://image.gsfc.nasa.gov/poetry/ask/abholes.html

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