Black Hole Force Line

Black Hole Force Line

The quest to understand our solar system begins close to home.
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Galaxy NGC 1068 is shown in visible light and X-rays in this composite image. High-energy X-rays (magenta) captured by NASA's Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array, or NuSTAR, are overlaid on visible-light images from both NASA's Hubble Space Telescope and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. The X-ray light is coming from an active supermassive black hole, also known as a quasar, in the center of the galaxy. This supermassive black hole has been extensively studied due to its relatively close proximity to our galaxy. Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Roma Tre Univ.

In 2015, researchers discovered a black hole named CID-947 that grew much more quickly than its host galaxy. The black hole at the galaxy’s center is nearly 7 billion times the mass of our Sun, placing it among the most massive black holes discovered. The galaxy’s mass, however, is considered normal. Because its light had to travel a very long distance, scientists were observing it at a period when the universe was less than 2 billion years old, just 14% of its current age (almost 14 billion years have passed since the Big Bang). Image credit: M. Helfenbein, Yale University / OPAC

Scientists obtained the first image of a black hole, seen here, using Event Horizon Telescope observations of the center of the galaxy M87. The image shows a bright ring formed as light bends due to the intense gravity around a black hole that is 6.5 billion times more massive than our Sun. Image credit: Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration

This animation illustrates the activity surrounding a black hole. While the matter that has passed the black hole's event horizon can't be seen, material swirling outside this threshold is accelerated to millions of degrees and radiates in X-rays. Image credit: CXC/A.Hobart

This illustration shows a glowing stream of material from a star disrupted as it was being devoured by a supermassive black hole. The black hole is surrounded by a ring of dust. When a star passes close enough to be swallowed by a black hole, the stellar material is stretched and compressed as it is pulled in, releasing an enormous amount of energy. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

NASA’s Chandra X-ray observatory detected record-breaking wind speeds coming from a disk around a black hole. This artist's impression shows how the strong gravity of the black hole, on the left, is pulling gas away from a companion star on the right. This gas forms a disk of hot gas around the black hole, and the wind is driven off this disk at 20 million mph, or about 3% the speed of light. Image credit: NASA/CXC/M.Weiss | More info ›

The central region of our galaxy, the Milky Way, contains an exotic collection of objects, including a supermassive black hole, called Sagittarius A*, weighing about 4 million times the mass of the Sun, clouds of gas at temperatures of millions of degrees, neutron stars and white dwarf stars tearing material from companion stars and beautiful tendrils of radio emission. The region around Sagittarius A* is shown in this composite image with Chandra data (green and blue) combined with radio data (red) from the MeerKAT telescope in South Africa, which will eventually become part of the Square Kilometer Array (SKA). Image credit: X-Ray: NASA/CXC/UMass/D. Wang et al.; Radio: SARAO/MeerKAT

This artist's concept shows the most distant supermassive black hole ever discovered. It is part of a quasar from just 690 million years after the Big Bang. Image credit: Robin Dienel/Carnegie Institution for Science

The central region of this image contains the highest concentration of supermassive black holes ever seen and about a billion over the entire sky. Made with over 7 million seconds of Chandra observing time, this 2017 image is part of the Chandra Deep Field-South. With its unprecedented look at the early universe in X-rays, it offers astronomers a look at the growth of black holes over billions of years starting soon after the Big Bang. In this image, low, medium and high-energy X-rays that Chandra detects are shown as red, green, and blue respectively. Image credit: NASA/CXC/Penn State/B.Luo et al. | More info ›

In this illustration of a black hole and its surrounding disk, gas spiraling toward the black hole piles up just outside it, creating a traffic jam. The traffic jam is closer in for smaller black holes, so X-rays are emitted on a shorter timescale. Image credit: NASA

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This artist 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. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
A black hole is an extremely dense object in space from which no light can escape. While black holes are mysterious and exotic, they are also a key consequence of how gravity works: When a lot of mass gets compressed into a small enough space, the resulting object rips the very fabric of space and time, becoming what is called a singularity. A black hole's gravity is so powerful that it will be able to pull in nearby material and "eat" it.
Want to visit a black hole? We don't recommend it. Find out why these gravitational mysteries are better studied from afar. › More
Here are 10 things you might want to know about black holes:
No light of any kind, including X-rays, can escape from inside the event horizon of a black hole, the region beyond which there is no return. NASA's telescopes that study black holes are looking at the surrounding environments of the black holes, where there is material very close to the event horizon. Matter is heated to millions of degrees as it is pulled toward the black hole, so it glows in X-rays. The immense gravity of black holes also distorts space itself, so it is possible to see the influence of an invisible gravitational pull on stars and other objects.
A stellar-mass black hole, with a mass of tens of times the mass of the Sun, can likely form in seconds, after the collapse of a massive star. These relatively small black holes can also be made through the merger of two dense stellar remnants called neutron stars. A neutron star can also merge with a black hole to make a bigger black hole, or two black holes can collide. Mergers like these also make black holes quickly, and produce ripples in space-time called gravitational waves.
More mysterious are the giant black holes found at the centers of galaxies — the "supermassive" black holes, which can weigh millions or billions of times the mass of the Sun. It can take less than a billion years for one to reach a very large size, but it is unknown how long it takes them to form, generally.
The research involves looking at the motions of stars in the centers of galaxies. These motions imply a dark, massive body whose mass can be computed from the speeds of the stars. The matter that falls into a black hole adds to the mass of the black hole. Its gravity doesn't disappear from the universe.
No. There is no way a black hole would eat an entire galaxy. The gravitational reach of supermassive black holes contained in the middle of galaxies is large, but not nearly large enough for eating the whole galaxy.
It certainly wouldn't be good! But what we know about the interior of black holes comes from Albert Einstein's General Theory of Relativity.
For black holes, distant observers will only see regions outside the event horizon, but individual observers falling into the black hole would experience quite another "reality." If you got into the event horizon, your perception of space and time would entirely change. At the same time, the immense gravity of the black hole would compress you horizontally and stretch you vertically like a noodle, which is why scientists call this phenomenon (no joke) "spaghettification."
Fortunately, this has never happened to anyone — black holes are too far away to pull in any matter from our solar system. But scientists have observed black holes ripping stars apart , a process that releases a tremendous amount of energy.
The Sun will never turn into a black hole because it is not massive enough to explode. Instead, the Sun will become a dense stellar remnant called a white dwarf.
But if, hypothetically, the Sun suddenly became a black hole with the same mass as it has today, this would not affect the orbits of the planets, because its gravitational influence on the solar system would be the same. So, Earth would continue to revolve around the Sun without getting pulled in — although the lack of sunlight would be disastrous for life on Earth.
Stellar-mass black holes are left behind when a massive star explodes. These explosions distribute elements such as carbon, nitrogen and oxygen that are necessary for life into space. Mergers between two neutron stars, two black holes, or a neutron star and black hole, similarly spread heavy elements around that may someday become part of new planets. The shock waves from stellar explosions may also trigger the formation of new stars and new solar systems. So, in some sense, we owe our existence on Earth to long-ago explosions and collision events that formed black holes.

On a larger scale, most galaxies seem to have supermassive black holes at their centers. The connection between the formation of these supermassive black holes and the formation of galaxies is still not understood. It is possible that a black hole could have played a role in the formation of our Milky Way galaxy. But this chicken-and-egg problem — that is, which came first, the galaxy or the black hole? — is one of the great puzzles of our universe.
The most distant black hole ever detected is located in a galaxy about 13.1 billion light-years from Earth. (The age of the universe is currently estimated to be about 13.8 billion years, so this means this black hole existed about 690 million years after the Big Bang.)
This supermassive black hole is what astronomers call a “quasar,” where large quantities of gas are pouring into the black hole so rapidly that the energy output is a thousand times greater than that of the galaxy itself. Its extreme brightness is how astronomers can detect it at such great distances.
The universe is a big place. In particular, the size of a region where a particular black hole has significant gravitational influence is quite limited compared to the size of a galaxy. This applies even to supermassive black holes like the one found in the middle of the Milky Way. This black hole has probably already "eaten" most or all of the stars that formed nearby, and stars further out are mostly safe from being pulled in. Since this black hole already weighs a few million times the mass of the Sun, there will only be small increases in its mass if it swallows a few more Sun-like stars. There is no danger of the Earth (located 26,000 light years away from the Milky Way's black hole) being pulled in.

Future galaxy collisions will cause black holes to grow in size, for example by merging of two black holes. But collisions won't happen indefinitely because the universe is big and because it's expanding, and so it's very unlikely that any sort of black hole runaway effect will occur.
Yes. The late physicist Stephen Hawking proposed that while black holes get bigger by eating material, they also slowly shrink because they are losing tiny amounts of energy called "Hawking radiation."
Hawking radiation occurs because empty space, or the vacuum, is not really empty. It is actually a sea of particles continually popping into and out of existence. Hawking showed that if a pair of such particles is created near a black hole, there is a chance that one of them will be pulled into the black hole before it is destroyed. In this event, its partner will escape into space. The energy for this comes from the black hole, so the black hole slowly loses energy, and mass, by this process.
Eventually, in theory, black holes will evaporate through Hawking radiation. But it would take much longer than the entire age of the universe for most black holes we know about to significantly evaporate. Black holes, even the ones around a few times the mass of the Sun, will be around for a really, really long time!

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On Wednesday (April 10), the international Event Horizon Telescope project will release the first results from its plan to image black holes. But what exactly is an event horizon?
The event horizon of a black hole is linked to the object's escape velocity — the speed that one would need to exceed to escape the black hole's gravitational pull. The closer someone came to a black hole, the greater the speed they would need to escape that massive gravity. The event horizon is the threshold around the black hole where the escape velocity surpasses the speed of light.
According to Einstein's theory of special relativity , nothing can travel faster through space than the speed of light. This means a black hole's event horizon is essentially the point from which nothing can return. The name refers to the impossibility of witnessing any event taking place inside that border, the horizon beyond which one cannot see.
"The event horizon is the ultimate prison wall — one can get in but never get out," Avi Loeb, chair of astronomy at Harvard University, told Space.com.
When an item gets near an event horizon, a witness would see the item's image redden and dim as gravity distorted light coming from that item. At the event horizon, this image would effectively fade to invisibility.
Within the event horizon, one would find the black hole's singularity, where previous research suggests all of the object's mass has collapsed to an infinitely dense extent. This means the fabric of space and time around the singularity has also curved to an infinite degree, so the laws of physics as we currently know them break down.
"The event horizon protects us from the unknown physics near a singularity," Loeb said.
The size of an event horizon depends on the black hole's mass. If Earth were compressed until it became a black hole, it would have a diameter of about 0.69 inches (17.4 millimeters), a little smaller than a dime; if the sun were converted to a black hole, it would be about 3.62 miles (5.84 kilometers) wide, about the size of a village or town. The supermassive black holes that the Event Horizon Telescope is observing are far larger; Sagittarius A*, at the center of the Milky Way, is about 4.3 million times the mass of our sun and has a diameter of about 7.9 million miles (12.7 million km), while M87 at the heart of the Virgo A galaxy is about 6 billion solar masses and 11 billion miles (17.7 billion km) wide.
The strength of a black hole's gravitational pull depends on the distance from it — the closer you are, the more powerful the tug. But the effects of this gravity on a visitor would differ depending on the black hole's mass. If you fell toward a relatively small black hole a few times the mass of the sun, for example, you would get pulled apart and stretched out in a process known as spaghettification, dying well before you reached the event horizon.
However, if you were to fall toward a supermassive black hole millions to billions of times the mass of the sun, you wouldn't "feel such forces to a significant degree," Loeb said. You would not die of spaghettification before you crossed the event horizon (although numerous other hazards around such a black hole might kill you before you reached that point).
Black holes likely spin because the stars they generally originate from also spun and because the matter they swallow whirled in spirals before it fell in. Recent findings suggest that black holes can rotate at speeds greater than 90 percent that of light, Loeb said.
Previously, the most basic model of black holes assumed they did not spin, and so their singularities were assumed to be points. But because black holes generally rotate, current models suggest their singularities are infinitely thin rings. This leads the event horizons of rotating black holes, also known as Kerr black holes, to appear oblong — squashed at the poles and bulging at their equators.
A rotating black hole's event horizon separates into an outer horizon and an inner horizon. The outer event horizon of such an object acts like a point of no return, just like the event horizon of a nonrotating black hole. The inner event horizon of a rotating black hole, also known as the Cauchy horizon, is stranger. Past that threshold, cause no longer necessarily precedes effect, the past no longer necessarily determines the future, and time travel may be possible. (In a nonrotating black hole, also known as a Schwarzschild black hole, the inner and outer horizons coincide.)
A spinning black hole also forces the fabric of space-time around it to rotate with it, a phenomenon known as frame dragging or the Lense-Thirring effect. Frame dragging is also seen around other massive bodies, including Earth.
Frame dragging creates a cosmic whirlpool known as the ergosphere, which occurs outside a rotating black hole's outer event horizon. Any object within the ergosphere is forced to move in the same direction in which the black hole is spinning. Matter falling into the ergosphere can get enough speed to escape the black hole's gravitational pull, taking some of the black hole's energy with it. In this manner, black holes can have powerful effects on their surroundings.
Rotation can also make black holes more effective at converting any matter that falls into them into energy. A nonrotating black hole would convert about 5.7 percent of an infalling object's mass into energy, following Einstein's famous equation E = mc^2. In contrast, a rotating black hole could convert up to 42 percent of an object's mass into energy, scientists have determined
"This has important implications for the environments around black holes," Loeb said. "The amount of energy from the supermassive black holes at the centers of virtually all large galaxies can significantly influence the evolution of those galaxies."
Recent work has greatly upset the conventional view of black holes. In 2012, physicists suggested that anything falling toward a black hole might encounter " firewalls " at or in the vicinity of the event horizon that would incinerate any matter falling in. This is because when particles collide, they can become invisibly connected throug
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