From getting turned into spaghetti to finding the end of space, here are 9 mind-blowing
facts about black holes!!!!
9.
How are they formed?
A black hole is a place where gravity is so strong that not even light can escape.
So how does this happen?
It’s all caused by dying stars.
When smaller stars begin to burn out and die over billions of years, they become dense,
neutron stars.
When a star at least about 3 times larger than our sun dies, it creates a supernova
explosion and if it is big enough, it will collapse in on itself from the force of gravity.
A supernova explosion lasts just about 100 seconds!!
Stars between 8 and 50 times the mass of our sun, exhaust their hydrogen core over millions
of years but it takes just seconds for it to collapse!!
As the star collapses, it reaches a certain point called “the event horizon” and time
on the star slows down.
When it reaches the event horizon it can’t collapse anymore, and the final end of the
star is the beginning of a black hole.
8.
How big are black holes?
Black holes come in many sizes.
Can you believe the smallest ones can be the size of an atom??
Even though that may be tiny, it has the mass of a large mountain!!
Scientists believe that there are mini black holes all around the universe, and possibly
even on Earth.
Why don't we feel them?
Well, they're so small, and their gravity is so unimpactful that we just don’t feel
them.
This was actually the basis of an episode of the sci-fi show Eureka.
To be fair though, none of these mini black holes have been observed as of yet.
But, scientists have been able to make miniscule audio black holes where no sound can escape.
So it may only be a matter of time.
The largest black holes are considered “supermassive” and have more mass than 1 million suns together.
Fun fact: Scientists have found that every large galaxy has a supermassive black hole
at the center, including ours!!
Does anyone know what it’s called??
Leave your guess in the comments below!
The answer is coming up!!
And if you are new here, be sure to subscribe and join the Origins Explained family!!!!
7.
Spaghettification What the heck is spaghettification??
It is a scientific term, I promise.
Scientists can have fun too!!
Also known as the “noodle effect”, it is when things are stretched into long thin
shapes, like spaghetti, because of very strong gravitational forces.
While this may sound funny, it is NOT something you want to happen to you!!
Or anyone!!
Scientists are hotly debating what would happen if you fell into a black hole.
Hypothetically, if you reached the event horizon, gravity would be so strong that you would
be stretched out violently by the gravity field into a one-molecule wide string.
Long story short, your body would be infinitely stretched as it gets pulled closer and closer
to the center of the black hole.
Your body will be kept together, but stretched until you reach atomic levels of thinness.
For you, time would begin to stand still because you would be moving at the speed of light,
or something like it.
But, for someone who is on the outside looking in, they have a much different view of what's
going on.
Remember I said that light doesn't escape a black hole, so of course no one can really
"view" what's happening inside of the black hole.
So, to the outside viewer, the person getting Spaghettified won't look that way.
What would you see?
A freeze frame image for lack of a better term.
They would see the last possible image of the person who had just crossed over into
the black holes gravitational field That image would remain for some time until
it would eventually change color and vanish with no sign of spaghettification, because
it would all happen so fast!!
Any object’s molecules that are pulled into the gravitational field of the black hole
would be ripped to shreds.
And after that??
That is the question.
6.
Black Holes Can Create Stars While you might think that black holes destroy
everything, that’s not entirely true.
When gigantic black holes form from a supernova, so much material explodes off far into space
that they can create entire new stars!!
An article was published in the journal Nature that said that supermassive black holes not
only create new stars, but also control how many stars a galaxy gets!!
Supermassive behemoth black holes can sometimes unloose enough material to form whole new
stars.
These black holes directly impact how quickly the process of star formation stops.
They say that star formation stops more quickly in galaxies with smaller black holes in the
center.
5.
Black Holes produce a lot of energy!
How is that possible?
It has to do with the event horizon of the black hole.
The closer things get to that event horizon, the faster things move as the gravitational
force gets stronger.
As all the material gathers around the event horizon and starts orbiting around, it gets
faster and faster.
Because of the speed it heats up, and it gets REALLY hot, like billions of degrees Fahrenheit
hot.
Things act differently at this temperature!!!
This extreme heat transforms the mass from the material into blackbody radiation, which
is a form of energy.
Now, this is significant for the following reason.
Here on Earth, our best nuclear fusion process can take .7% of mass, and turn it into energy.
Because of how the black hole works, it can convert 10% of mass into energy.
See the difference?
In fact, this is so extraordinary in the minds of some scientists that they think this radiation
and process could be used to power spaceships in the future!!
Interestingly enough, black holes can also evaporate and disappear over time.
Stephen Hawking predicted this discovery in 1974.
Now called Hawking radiation, it evaporates into space little by little until there is
nothing left.
4.
How many black holes are there?
As you now know, there are many different sized black holes in the universe, including
some that are too tiny to see.
But even if we just talked about the ones we could see, there are actually too many
too count.
Just within our Milky Way Galaxy, there are believed to be about 100 million black holes
of the "stellar mass" variety.
(Which is between the “atom size” and the “supermassive” size).
That's a lot.
How do we know this??
The Milky Way galaxy has about 100 billion stars.
Based on that, about one out of every thousand stars is massive enough to become a black
holes.
So our galaxy probably has around 100 million black holes.
Out of all of these, only about 12 have been identified.
The nearest one is about 1,600 light years away, soooo…..that’s one less thing to
worry about!!
3.
Do black holes consume everything?
Contrary to popular belief, black holes don’t go around sucking the life force out of stars
and eating everything in sight.
While you might think that nothing escapes black holes, that’s not necessarily the
case.
Light doesn't escape black holes.
Surprisingly, there are cases of black holes "spitting out" certain objects into the universe.
To be fair, not every black hole can do this, in fact, the only recorded cases of this are
with the Supermassive Black Holes, you know, the ones that are billions of times bigger
than our sun?
Anyway, matter can apparently slip by the accretion disk within the black hole, which
means it doesn't enter the "point of no return", as such, the gravity of the black hole will
actually "spit" it back out.
These "spitballs" can be the size of planets!!
ANSWER: For those of you who guessed, the supermassive black hole at the center of our
galaxy is SAGITTARIUS A. It has a mass equal to about 4 million suns and would fit inside
a very large ball that could hold a few million Earths!!
In the case of Sagittarius A, these chunks are spewed into the galaxy at a rate of 20
million miles per hour.
Hopefully not too close to our solar system!!
2.
How strong is a black hole?
Now that you know that black holes can’t consume everything in sight, and aren’t
cosmic vacuums, just how strong is a black hole?
It’s gravity doesn’t reach out infinitely.
They are confined by a very basic law: the strength of gravity depends on its mass.
For example, take the Earth.
The Earth has a certain amount of gravity attributed to it, which is why we can hold
the moon in an orbit.
Now, imagine a black hole suddenly appeared in the galaxy, and it was the exact same size
as Earth.
The gravity field it emits would be the same as Earth's.
If you replaced the sun with a black hole of the same mass, the Earth would not get
sucked in.
It would just keep orbiting in the same way.
Now, once you crossover past the event horizon into the black hole itself, you'll begin to
feel its pull.
If you're outside of it?
You're perfectly safe.
Just make sure you know how big the black hole is before you get close to it, ok?
Jokes aside, you may have seen images of matter from a star getting sucked into a black hole
but it’s actually stellar wind that is getting pulled in.
Not the whole life of the star!
1.
What is at the center?
When I was telling you about spaghettification, I mentioned that hypothetically, if you passed
the event horizon, gravity would be so strong that you would be stretched out violently
by the gravity field into a one-molecule wide string.
But you would think that in theory, those molecules would get pulled into the center
of the black hole.
But what does that mean??
Einstein believed that that was the end.
After that, everything was over.
BUT a physicist from the University of California, Santa Barbara, Joe Polchinski says that the
inside of a black hole might not exist.
He says that there is no inside at all, and it is probably the end of space itself!!
As if black holes weren’t already super abstract and difficult to understand, there
is a huge mystery with black holes.
Quantum physics theory states that information can never disappear so your atoms could be
“rearranged”, but in theory you should be able to see those atoms and tell that they
were once a part of a human.
But if a black hole evaporates like Stephen Hawking showed, then that means everything
vanishes with it.
Another confusing aspect is that the core of a black hole is infinitely small, yet has
infinite mass.
What's more, time and space bend around the core, so time actually slows down, and space
is literally swallowed into it.
Which begs the question, "What is going on inside the core of a black hole?"
The debate and theories continue!!
Thanks for watching!
Hope you learned something new!!
Let me know what your favorite fact was in the comments!
Be sure to subscribe and see you next time!