Black Holes Essay

Black Holes
Evan Bunis
Groton Dunstable Regional

A Black Hole is defined as an object in space that is so compact, that has a gravitational pull so powerful, not even light can escape its pull. In most cases Black Holes are formed when a massive star (much larger than our own) undergoes a supernova explosion. When this happens, the star may collapse on its own gravitational pull, thus resulting in a an object with infinitely large density and zero volume. As a result, the escape velocity (the speed required to escape the gravitational pull) becomes even greater than the speed of light, and because nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, nothing can escape a black hole.
The idea of Black Holes was first proposed in the 1700s by scientists John Michell and Pierre-Simon Laplace, who argued, independant of each other, that there might be objects in the universe with such a large gravitational force, that even light could be trapped. Published in 1916 Einstein’s theory of general relativity which included how gravity does affect light’s motion, gave way to scientific discoveries involving black holes. In Einstein’s own theory, he was only able to approximate the solutions to some of his own equations, however Karl Schwarzschild was able to provide the solutions. These solutions described objects like black holes that had such massive density that nothing could escape them. Schwarzschild theorized that if an object had such a small radius, that the escape velocity will be greater than the speed of light. Because as previously mentioned, nothing is faster than the speed of light, the object would be sucked into itself by it’s own gravitational pull, which would cause the object to disappear. What r...

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...nd charge. All the other matter that went into the black hole is negligible, it is completely lose and there is no way to know what it was. Clifford A. Pickover describes this by saying,
All other information about a black hole prior to its formation is lost when matter is crushed into the singularity. For example, if you had a sufficient number of television sets crammed into the appropriate volume of space, the black hole formed would give you no clue that the original matter came from television sets. No amount of detective work would force a black hole to reveal the secret of its background.

In the 1970’s, Stephen Hawking made the argument that the quantum-mechanical effects of black holes made them emit radiation

news from hawking radiation heat black hole evaporation wormholeas how they are found end: what would happen if you fell in sun became one