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    Black Holes

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    Fitri Aulia Permatasari
    Black holes are formed when massive stars over 10 times the size of our sun collapse at the end of their life cycles. If the remaining core is between 1.5 and 3 solar masses, it becomes a neutron star, and anything over 3 solar masses will collapse into a black hole with infinite density. While black holes cannot be seen directly, astronomers can detect them by observing emitted radiation from superheated gases circling the black hole, estimating the black hole's mass from the movement of orbiting objects, and detecting gravitational lensing effects.

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    Black Holes

    Uploaded by

    Fitri Aulia Permatasari
    60 views3 pages
    Black holes are formed when massive stars over 10 times the size of our sun collapse at the end of their life cycles. If the remaining core is between 1.5 and 3 solar masses, it becomes a neutron star, and anything over 3 solar masses will collapse into a black hole with infinite density. While black holes cannot be seen directly, astronomers can detect them by observing emitted radiation from superheated gases circling the black hole, estimating the black hole's mass from the movement of orbiting objects, and detecting gravitational lensing effects.

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    Black holes are formed when massive stars over 10 times the size of our sun collapse at the end of their life cycles. If the remaining core is between 1.5 and 3 solar masses, it becomes a neutron star, and anything over 3 solar masses will collapse into a black hole with infinite density. While black holes cannot be seen directly, astronomers can detect them by observing emitted radiation from superheated gases circling the black hole, estimating the black hole's mass from the movement of orbiting objects, and detecting gravitational lensing effects.

    Copyright:

    Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
    Download as DOC, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as doc, pdf, or txt
    60 views3 pages

    Black Holes

    Uploaded by

    Fitri Aulia Permatasari
    Black holes are formed when massive stars over 10 times the size of our sun collapse at the end of their life cycles. If the remaining core is between 1.5 and 3 solar masses, it becomes a neutron star, and anything over 3 solar masses will collapse into a black hole with infinite density. While black holes cannot be seen directly, astronomers can detect them by observing emitted radiation from superheated gases circling the black hole, estimating the black hole's mass from the movement of orbiting objects, and detecting gravitational lensing effects.

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    Black Holes

    Background
    Until the 1960s, most astronomers and physicists thought of black holes as science fiction, not real science. Many popular movies and television shows portrayed them as cosmic vacuums sucking up everything in sight or as tunnels through which one could travel in time to another dimension. Black holes were theoretic objects that were predicted by Einstein's General Theory of Relativity, which was published in 1916. The theory of relativity describes a four-dimensional universe known as spacetime (the three dimensions of space plus the fourth dimension, time). Although the theory suggested that black holes could exist in spacetime, even Einstein thought of them as mathematical curiosities and doubted their real existence. Einstein died (1955) before the term black hole was coined by John Wheeler in 1967.

    The existence of black holes is now accepted science. However, we have no technology that allows us to see them, and the evidence for their existence remains circumstantial.

    Black holes are the evolutionary endpoints of massive stars. They are what huge stars, more than 10 times as massive as the sun, become when they have burned up all their fuel at the end of their "lives." Obviously, stars are not living organisms, but they do go through various stages during their existence, and they don't last forever. To understand how black holes are formed, we have to understand the life cycle of stars.

    The Life Cycle of Stars


    A nebula is a large cloud of gas and dust from which stars may form. Gravity pulls the gas and dust into a much smaller volume creating a dense mass destined to be a young star. The intense gravitational attraction between the hydrogen atoms causes a chemical reaction called nuclear fusion. This reaction, during which hydrogen atoms combine to form helium, and then heavier elements, causes the release of huge amounts of electromagnetic radiation. During the star's adult years, there is a balance between gravity (which pulls atoms together and tends to make the star collapse) and the outward pressure produced by heat from the nuclear reactions (which tends to keep the star from collapsing). This goes on for millions to hundreds of billions of years, depending on the star's mass. The greater the mass, the faster the star's atoms undergo nuclear fusion. High mass stars burn hotter and faster, and have shorter lifespans than stars of lower mass. During a star's old age, when most of its hydrogen has been changed into helium, it experiences fewer and fewer nuclear reactions. When its fuel is exhausted, the balance between gravity and the outward pressure produced by the heat of nuclear fusion is abolished. The unopposed gravity causes the cooling star to shrink and collapse.

    The Death of Stars


    At this point, one of three things may happen to the dying star. The final stage of a star's existence depends on its mass. If the remaining dense core of a low or medium mass star is less than one and a half times that of the sun (1.5 solar masses), it may cool down and become a white dwarf, an object about the size of earth. Although it has no fuel, the leftover energy in a white dwarf allows it to glow faintly. When a high mass star runs out of fuel, its compressed core undergoes a supernova explosion. The cooling mass that is released may become a neutron star, which is smaller and denser than a white dwarf. Neutron stars that spin and emit radio waves are known as pulsars. Stars with the greatest mass may undergo a more mysterious change after their supernova explosions. If the mass of the remnant star is greater than three times the mass of the sun (3 solar masses), the highly compressed collapsing star may be doomed to shrink to nothing but a point in space where its density is infinite. At that point, it will have become a black hole!

    What Stars Become When They Exhaust Their Fuel and Die

    Mass of Star Before it Collapses (in solar mass) < 1.5 1.5-3 >3

    Star's Fate white dwarf neutron star black hole

    Characteristics of Black Holes


    As we have seen, black holes are the collapsed corpses of massive stars. Their creation requires that a particular amount of mass be crammed into a critically small volume. Since an object's density is equal to its mass divided by the volume it occupies, we can understand that when a star's mass collapses into zero volume, its density is infinite. This infinitely dense center of a black hole, which has no dimensions at all, is known as the singularity. The core's gravity is so strong that nothing can escape from it. The boundary beyond which nothing can escape, not even light, is known as the event horizon. Because it cannot emit light, this final stage of a massive star is invisible, which is why it is called a "black hole." What happens inside a black hole is unknown, but our current theories of physics do not apply there. Anything that crosses the event horizon will be sucked into the black hole and can never escape.

    How Scientists Detect Black Holes


    Although we cannot see black holes, circumstantial evidence of their existence has grown over the last half century, and astronomers are now confident that they can infer the existence of black holes in most large galaxies. Since they cannot see them, scientists detect the presence of black holes by examining the behavior of visible objects around them. The evidence comes from three types of observations and calculations: emitted radiation, estimates of the mass of a black hole from the movement of objects circling it, and gravitational lens effects.

    Circumstantial Evidence Astronomers Use to Detect Invisible Black Holes

    Emitted Radiation Estimates of the Mass of Black Holes Based on the Movement of Visible Objects Around Them Gravitational Lens Effects

    Emitted Radiation: A black hole's gravitational forces are so great that gases circulating near a black hole are expected to revolve more rapidly or accelerate as they fall into the black hole. This acceleration creates increased friction and therefore more heat. Radiation emitted from the superheated gases can be detected and measured by Xray telescopes such as the orbiting Chandra Xray Observatory. Scientists can conclude that a black hole exists in the area from which the radiation originated. Click here to view an image of the Chandra Xray Observatory.

    Mass Estimates from Orbiting Objects: This technique involves measuring the movement of objects around a suspected black hole to calculate the black hole's mass. Scientists look for a star or disk of gas behaving as if a large mass is nearby, and then estimate the mass of the suspected black hole by observing its effect on the visible object. Using photos of other galaxies taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, for example, astronomers have been able to estimate the speed of particles circling around a core object. From this information, they can estimate the weight of the core object. In one galaxy (NGC4261), scientists were able to calculate the weight of the core object to be 1.2 billion times that of our sun, and from this, estimated its gravity to be 1 million times as strong as our sun. Based on these data, they concluded that the center of that galaxy must be a black hole. Click here to view a Hubble Space Telescope photograph of the core of galaxy NGC4261.

    Gravitational Lens Effects: The use of this technique to detect black holes is based on the principle from Einstein's General Theory of Relativity that gravity can bend light. The idea is that an object with very strong gravitational forces, like a black hole, lying between earth and a more distant object, could behave like a lens, bending the light from the more distant object and bringing it into focus. In fact, astronomers have photographed the temporary brightening of a distant galaxy produced by the gravitational lens effect of an invisible object passing between the galaxy and earth, presumably a black hole.

    More About Black Holes


    The sizes of black holes vary tremendously, Astronomers have detected many blacks holes that are the size of stars, as well as immense black holes with cores that are billions of times the mass of our sun.

    There are two basic types of black holes: non-rotating (Schwarzchild) and rotating (Kerr) black holes. The latter, which are created by rotating stars, are probably more common.

    Most astronomers now believe that there are 100 million black holes in our galaxy alone. However, others believe this is an underestimation. Stephen Hawkings, for example, believes that there are more black holes than visible stars. He estimates than there are more than 100,000 million black holes in our galaxy alone, and we're just a tiny part of the universe!

    Click here for my bibliography.

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    Animated Lines: <"http://www.wilsoninfo.com/lines.htm">

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