Black Holes

Physics 1010 Topical Paper

By Cesar Alan Morales

Now we have all heard about black holes, but do we really know what they are or how they are made. Most people know the basis of a black hole from watching television or a movie. What they show usually involves a big black hole sucking up a world or something of that sort. Basically eating everything and anything in its path. Is what they show on the television really true? Lets start by defining what a black hole is. A black hole is an immense amount of matter that is packed into a very small area. The gravitational field is so strong that nothing, not even light can escape. Even though scientist cant see them with any special type of scope, they predict where they might be, by watching their surroundings and what is happening. Thus we can study furthermore a black hole. Another common question is how are black holes created? Einstein gave some insight into that with his theory of relativity. Where he stated that when a massive star dies, it leaves a small, but dense core. Which if the cores mass is more than three times the mass of the sun, all other forces will be overwhelmed and thus a black hole is created. During a normal stars life there is a constant tug a war between gravity pulling and pressure pushing out. Since there is so much nuclear reactions in the core occurring, those produce enough energy to push outward. For most of the life span of a star, these two balance out and so the star is stable. However, when a star runs out of nuclear fuel, that is when gravity takes over and the material in the core is condensed even further. Eventually some become known as white dwarfs, which explode into supernovas. When they explode their matter shoots out into space, while the core completely collapses under its own weight, thus creating a black hole.

Black holes were first discovered in the 1790s by John Michell of England and Pierre LaPlace of France who used Newtons Laws to theorize the existence of an invisible star. Michell and LaPlace calculated the mass and size which is now know as the event horizon, that an object needs in order to have escape velocity which is greater than the speed of light. In 1967 John Wheeler, and American theoretical physicist, applied the term black hole to the collapsed objects. Now that we know what a black hole is, who discovered it, and how they are created, lets answer other questions, such as why does light get trapped, if it doesnt even have mass? Well Newton thought that only objects with mass could produce a gravitational force on each other. Such as the Earth and the apple that fell on his head. Well applying newtons theory of gravity, one would find out that since light has no mass, the force of gravity couldnt affect it right? Wrong. Einstein discovered that the situation is a bit more complicated than that. Einstein discovered that gravity is produced by curved space-time. Then Einstein theorized that the mass and radius of an object actually curves space-time rather than the other way around. Mass is linked to space in a way that even today we still cant completely understand. What we do know is that the stronger the gravitational field of an object, the more the space around the object is curved. So instead of having straight lines, they become curved, and since light travels on a straight-line path, the light would follow the curved path that is made by the strong gravitational field. Light bending due to gravitational field was first observed by Sir Arthur Eddington in the 1920s when he observed starlight curve when it traveled close to the sun. Since explaining this is kind of hard to start off with, so is picturing it. So

another way of thing of it is taking a sheet of toilet paper and dropping a marble or heavy sphere in the middle and that is kind of what a black hole is. Now black holes are depicted as big black holes sucking up everything, but what do they look like really? Well a black hole is invisible itself because light cant escape from it. Thus that is why their first name was invisible stars. Even though they are invisible, we still know that they are there because of the way they affect other stars and the gasses close to it. For example lets say two stars are in the same region and they both explode. On fallow the path of a black hole and the other turns into flying matter. Scientist find that the flying matter starts to circle around the black hole eventually getting sucked in. This is how we can tell that there is such a thing as a black hole. Last but not least, I think that most of us ask this question. Do all stars become black holes? Since we have a star in front of us, which is the sun I sometime wonder if it will become a black hole, but no. Only stars with very large masses can become black holes. Our sun, is not massive enough to become a black hole. Four billion years from now when the sun runs out of the available nuclear fuel in its core, our sun will die a fairly quiet death. Stars of this type e end their story as a white dwarf star. More massive stars, such as those with masses of 20 times our suns mass, do eventually become or create a black hole. When a massive star runs out of nuclear fuel it can no longer sustain its own weight and it begins to collapse. When this occurs the star heats up and some fractions of its outer layer, which often still contain some fresh nuclear fuel, activates the nuclear reaction again and explodes into a supernova. The remaining innermost fraction of the star, the core, which determines its fate, is about 2.5 solar masses. It is thought that

to produce a core of 2.5 solar masses the ancestral star should began with over 20 solar masses. A black hole is formed.

Reference: Boslough, John. Stephen Hawking's Universe. Morrow Publishing, 1985. Hawking, Stephen. A Brief History of Time. Bantam Publishing, 1996. Thorne, Kip S. Black Holes and Time Warps. W.W. Norton & Co., 1994 Kaufmann, William J. III. Universe. W.H. Freeman & Co., San Francisco, 1998. Thorne, Kip S. Black Holes and Time Warps. W.W. Norton & Co., 1994.