Black Holes

Black holes are a very interesting part of our universe. It is their mysteriousness that makes them so fascinating. A movie that I really enjoyed watching is Interstellar. This movie takes place in the future where humans are suffering on Earth due to blight and famine. Astronomers are trying to find another planet for humans to relocate to. I highly recommend watching it. My favorite scene is the scene with a giant black hole called Gargantua. I had already heard about such magnificent objects, and my friends and I always made jokes and stories about black holes arriving and sucking in everything. However, I did not really know what they looked like, so I was quite fascinated by the black hole in the movie. The movie did a pretty good job of depicting and simulating a black hole, although there were some parts that were not accurate. Of course they did that to keep the movie interesting for the audience. 

Gargantua from Interstellar

Now, the formation of black holes is a very intriguing process. When a star nears the end of its life, it runs out of fuel for nuclear fusion. Nuclear fusion creates an outward pressure that counters the pressure from the gravity of the star’s mass. When the fuel for nuclear fusion runs out, the pressure starts dropping. When the pressure is low enough, the gravity takes over and the mass of the star collapses on itself. For massive stars, this collapse causes a supernova, which is a massive explosion releasing a ton of energy. After the supernova, the core of the star remains. If the core has enough mass, it will become a neutron star. If the core is even more massive it will continue to collapse, creating a small point that is extremely dense. This point is called the singularity and it is the center of a black hole. The singularity is so dense that light cannot escape from it. The gravity will pull in objects around it, expanding the black hole. Around the black hole is the event horizon and the accretion disk which contains the matter that the black hole is made of.

As objects get closer to the black hole, the gravity of the black hole will pull it closer. As objects are getting pulled into the black hole, they tend to get stretched and squeezed due to extreme gravitational forces. One fact about black holes that was most interesting for me was their effect on time. Black holes cause time dilation due to them having immense gravity. As an object gets closer, time slows down. From the perspective of the object getting pulled in, time will seem to go as normal. From the perspective of a viewer from afar, time will seem to slow down and even stop as the object gets really close to the black hole.

There is still so much to learn about black holes, and astronomers are still locating more and more black holes. There are so many out there that we have not seen yet. I hope we will learn all the cool properties of black holes. I really would like to know how big a black hole could get, and if there are larger black holes out there than the ones we already know.

Source:Black Holes - NASA Science