Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Black Holes: Monsters in Space
Black Holes: Monsters in Space
This
artist's concept illustrates a supermassive black hole with millions to
billions times the mass of our sun. Supermassive black holes are
enormously dense objects buried at the hearts of galaxies. (Smaller
black holes also exist throughout galaxies.) In this illustration, the
supermassive black hole at the center is surrounded by matter flowing
onto the black hole in what is termed an accretion disk. This disk forms
as the dust and gas in the galaxy falls onto the hole, attracted by its
gravity.
1 comment:
I found this article very interesting, though it was hard to understand and has no real conclusion. This topic is still a mystery. There are many theories about the "event horizon." The event horizon is basically a border, or a line in where the safety around the black hole ends. One of the theories state that as soon as you pass the horizon, you could be stretched out and completely collapse, or as another states, you could just be burnt to a crisp. The second theory, which was Einstein's theory of relativity, was where the idea of event horizons came from. Stephen Hawking proposes a new explanation, he says that there is NO event horizon. There is an "apparent horizon," which is a surface where light tries to escape out of the black hole. (There are a few theories on whether this is possible or not too.) Though none have completely evaluated Hawking's paper, many say that his reasoning sounds reasonable. But, as Stephen says this, it is saying that anything can get out of a black hole. I think that it is possible, and it might be happening, yet we don't see it. Like Schrodinger's cat, it is possible that light escapes when we are not monitoring and looking at it. Lastly, to have a full explanation of this theory, we need to find more forces of nature besides gravity that we can use to help prove this. Black holes in general interest me, and so do Stephen Hawking's explanations of curved space, relativity, and time travel. He is a really amazing physicist, even though he is hard to understand. I really want to know more about this topic and it interests me a lot.
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