Site hosted by Angelfire.com: Build your free website today!

Introduction of Black Hole

Black Hole
1.What is black hole
2.Do they really exist?
3.What makes it impossible to escape from black hole
4.Effects of falling into a black hole
  4.1 Spaghettification
  4.2 Before the falling object crosses the event horizon
  4.3 As the object passes through the event horizon
  4.4 Inside the event horizon
  4.5 Hitting the singularity
5. Forget this, I want to see some pictures

1.What is black hole

      A black hole is a region of spacetime from which nothing can escape, even light.The term derives from the fact that the absorption of visible light renders the hole's interior invisible, and indistinguishable from the black space around it.Despite its interior being invisible, a black hole may reveal its presence through an interaction with matter that lies in orbit outside its event horizon. For example, a black hole may be perceived by tracking the movement of a group of stars that orbit its center. Alternatively, one may observe gas (from a nearby star, for instance) that has been drawn into the black hole. The gas spirals inward, heating up to very high temperatures and emitting large amounts of radiation that can be detected from earthbound and earth-orbiting telescopes

      To see why this happens, imagine throwing a tennis ball into the air. The harder you throw the tennis ball, the faster it is travelling when it leaves your hand and the higher the ball will go before turning back. If you throw it hard enough it will never return, the gravitational attraction will not be able to pull it back down. The velocity the ball must have to escape is known as the escape velocity and for the earth is about 7 miles a second.

      As a body is crushed into a smaller and smaller volume, the gravitational attraction increases, and hence the escape velocity gets bigger. Things have to be thrown harder and harder to escape. Eventually a point is reached when even light, which travels at 186 thousand miles a second, is not travelling fast enough to escape. At this point, nothing can get out as nothing can travel faster than light.While general relativity describes a black hole as a region of empty space with a point-like singularity at the center and an event horizon at the outer edge, the description changes when the effects of quantum mechanics are taken into account. Research on this subject indicates that, rather than holding captured matter forever, black holes may slowly leak a form of thermal energy called Hawking radiation and may well have a finite life.However, the final, correct description of black holes, requiring a theory of quantum gravity, is unknown.This is black hole.

2.Do they really exist?

      It is impossible to see a black hole directly because no light can escape from them; they are black. But there are good reasons to think they exist.

      When a large star has burnt all its fuel it explodes into a supernova. The stuff that is left collapses down to an extremely dense object known as a neutron star. We know that these objects exist because several have been found using radio telescopes.

      If the neutron star is too large, the gravitational forces overwhelm the pressure gradients and collapse cannot be halted. The neutron star continues to shrink until it finally becomes a black hole. This mass limit is only a couple of solar masses, that is about twice the mass of our sun, and so we should expect at least a few neutron stars to have this mass. (Our sun is not particularly large; in fact it is quite small.)

      A supernova occurs in our galaxy once every 300 years, and in neighbouring galaxies about 500 neutron stars have been identified. Therefore we are quite confident that there should also be some black holes.

3.What makes it impossible to escape from black hole

      Popular accounts commonly try to explain the black hole phenomenon by using the concept of escape velocity, the speed needed for a vessel starting at the surface of a massive object to completely clear the object's gravitational field. It follows from Newton's law of gravity that a sufficiently dense object's escape velocity will equal or even exceed the speed of light. Citing that nothing can exceed the speed of light they then infer that nothing would be able to escape such a dense object.

      However, the argument has a flaw in that it does not explain why light would be affected by a gravitating body or why it would not be able to escape. Nor does it give a satisfactory explanation for why a powered spaceship would not be able to break free.The second concept is the base of general relativity; mass deforms the structure of this spacetime. The effect of a mass on spacetime can informally be described as tilting the direction of time towards the mass. As a result, objects tend to move towards masses. This is experienced as gravity. This tilting effect becomes more pronounced as the distance to the mass becomes smaller. At some point close to the mass, the tilting becomes so strong that all the possible paths an object can take lead towards the mass.This implies that any object that crosses this point can no longer get further away from the mass, not even using powered flight. This point is called the event horizon.

      Two concepts introduced by Albert Einstein are needed to explain the phenomenon. The first is that time and space are not two independent concepts, but are interrelated forming a single continuum, spacetime. This continuum has some special properties. An object is not free to move around spacetime at will; it must always move forward in time and cannot change its position in space faster than the speed of light. This is the main result of the theory of special relativity.

      The second concept is the base of general relativity; mass deforms the structure of this spacetime. The effect of a mass on spacetime can informally be described as tilting the direction of time towards the mass. As a result, objects tend to move towards masses. This is experienced as gravity. This tilting effect becomes more pronounced as the distance to the mass becomes smaller. At some point close to the mass, the tilting becomes so strong that all the possible paths an object can take lead towards the mass.This implies that any object that crosses this point can no longer get further away from the mass, not even using powered flight. This point is called the event horizon.

4.Effects of falling into a black hole

      This section describes what happens when something falls into a Schwarzschild (i.e. non-rotating and uncharged) black hole. Rotating and charged black holes have some additional complications when falling into them, which are not treated here.

  4.1 Spaghettification

      An object in any very strong gravitational field feels a tidal force stretching it in the direction of the object generating the gravitational field. This is because the inverse square law causes nearer parts of the stretched object to feel a stronger attraction than farther parts. Near black holes, the tidal force is expected to be strong enough to deform any object falling into it, even atoms or composite nucleons; this is called spaghettification. The process of spaghettification is as follows. First, the object that is falling into the black hole splits in two. Then the two pieces each split themselves, rendering a total of four pieces. Then the four pieces split to form eight. This process of bifurcation continues up to and past the point in which the split-up pieces of the original object are at the order of magnitude of the constituents of atoms. At the end of the spaghettification process, the object is a string of elementary particles.

      The strength of the tidal force of a black hole depends on how gravitational attraction changes with distance, rather than on the absolute force being felt. This means that small black holes cause spaghettification while infalling objects are still outside their event horizons, whereas objects falling into large, supermassive black holes may not be deformed or otherwise feel excessively large forces before passing the event horizon.

  4.2 Before the falling object crosses the event horizon

      An object in a gravitational field experiences a slowing down of time, called gravitational time dilation, relative to observers outside the field. The outside observer will see that physical processes in the object, including clocks, appear to run slowly. As a test object approaches the event horizon, its gravitational time dilation (as measured by an observer far from the hole) would approach infinity. Its time would appear to be stopped.

      From the viewpoint of a distant observer, an object falling into a black hole appears to slow down, approaching but never quite reaching the event horizon: and it appears to become redder and dimmer, because of the extreme gravitational red shift caused by the gravity of the black hole. Eventually, the falling object becomes so dim that it can no longer be seen, at a point just before it reaches the event horizon. All of this is a consequence of time dilation: the object's movement is one of the processes that appear to run slower and slower, and the time dilation effect is more significant than the acceleration due to gravity; the frequency of light from the object appears to decrease, making it look redder, because the light appears to complete fewer cycles per "tick" of the observer's clock; lower-frequency light has less energy and therefore appears dimmer, as well as redder.

      From the viewpoint of the falling object, distant objects generally appear blue-shifted due to the gravitational field of the black hole. This effect may be partly (or even entirely) negated by the red shift caused by the velocity of the infalling object with respect to the object in the distance

  4.3 As the object passes through the event horizon

      From the viewpoint of the falling object, nothing particularly special happens at the event horizon. In fact, there is no (local) way for him to find out whether he has passed the horizon or not. An infalling object takes a finite proper time (i.e. measured by its own clock) to fall past the event horizon. This in contrast with the infinite amount of time it takes for a distant observer to see the infalling object cross the horizon.

  4.4 Inside the event horizon

      The object reaches the singularity at the center within a finite amount of proper time, as measured by the falling object. An observer on the falling object would continue to see objects outside the event horizon, blue-shifted or red-shifted depending on the falling object's trajectory.

      The amount of proper time a faller experiences below the event horizon depends upon where they started from rest, with the maximum being for someone who starts from rest at the event horizon. A paper in 2007 examined the effect of firing a rocket pack within the black hole, showing that this can only reduce the proper time of a person who starts from rest at the event horizon. However, for anyone else, a judicious burst of the rocket can extend the lifetime of the faller, but overdoing it will again reduce the proper time experienced. However, this cannot prevent the inevitable collision with the central singularity.

  4.5 Hitting the singularity

      As an infalling object approaches the singularity, tidal forces acting on it approach infinity. All components of the object, including atoms and subatomic particles, are torn away from each other before striking the singularity. At the singularity itself, effects are unknown; it is believed that a theory of quantum gravity is needed to accurately describe events near it

5.Forget this, I want to see some pictures

      To see some observational evidence for black holes from the Hubble space telescope see the next page.