The Jewel of Physics – The Black Hole
Published by There were many fascinating secrets in science that kept thousands of smartest people awake for days trying to find the answer. What or who created the human kind? What caused the beginning of the universe? Did human beings evolved from other species or were we created? What is the Dark Matter? The list of the biggest secrets of science could go on. But why exactly so many great thinkers spend thousands of hours looking for the answers to these questions. The answer is simple – because the biggest charm lies in the journey to knowledge and the knowledge is the biggest power. I also feel the charm of these mysteries and enjoy thinking about it. Thus I would like to share my interest and write about one of the biggest secrets of the universe – the Black Holes.
According to the general theory of relativity, a black hole is a region of space from which nothing, including light, can escape, due to the enormously strong gravitational force around it.
Image via Wikipedia
Now that we know what a Black Hole is let’s talk about some history of Black Holes. The biggest discoveries about these celestial objects were made during the XX century, due to the discovery of General and Special theories of relativity. At the same time astronomers were observing the sky and realized that stars should be sucked to a small ball due to their gravitational pull. They, of course, started questioning why we see different behavior of stars in reality. Soon astronomers and physicists realized that stars do not collapse due to their fuel, by burning which stars beat their own gravitation and emit energy and radiation. However it’s logical to believe that the fuel (helium and hydrogen) runs out after some time (billions of years) so the next question was what the hell happens when stars do not have anymore fuel? Well to talk about the scenarios of the death of the star we should consider its size.
A star will become a white dwarf, neutron star, or a black hole, depending on how massive it was.
Low mass star (mass under 1.5 times the mass of the Sun): So when the star begins to exhaust its fuel (hydrogen) its life comes near to the end. The outer regions of a star become red and the star expands till it has helium supply. When all the fuel is finally gone the star cannot fight the gravitational force and starts collapsing. It then collapses to a small white ball of a size similar to the size of earth, which is called a white dwarf. When the white dwarf becomes cool enough not to emit heat and light, it hypothetically becomes another stellar remnant – a black dwarf. However the time, which is required for a white dwarf to run out of fuel, is longer than 13 or 14 billion years (approximately the age of the universe) so no black dwarfs have been observed or found.
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On March 19, 2010 at 10:56 pm
good article