Black hole how does it work

So although we cannot see black holes, there is indirect evidence that they exist. They have been associated with time travel and worm holes and remain fascinating objects in the universe. Sign up for our Newsletter! Mobile Newsletter banner close. Mobile Newsletter chat close. Mobile Newsletter chat dots.

Mobile Newsletter chat avatar. Mobile Newsletter chat subscribe. Astronomy Terms. How Black Holes Work. See more black hole images. Gitlin, artist. Contents What Is a Black Hole? What Is a Black Hole? Artist concept of a black hole: The arrows show the paths of objects in and around the opening of the black hole. Types of Black Holes " ". Artist concept of a black hole and its surroundings: The blackened circle is the event horizon and the egg-shaped region is the ergosphere.

Schwarzschild - Non-rotating black hole Kerr - Rotating black hole. Singularity - The collapsed core Event horizon - The opening of the hole Ergosphere - An egg-shaped region of distorted space around the event horizon The distortion is caused by the spinning of the black hole, which "drags" the space around it. Static limit - The boundary between the ergosphere and normal space. Mass Electric charge Rate of rotation angular momentum. How We Detect Black Holes " ".

Mass estimates from objects orbiting a black hole or spiraling into the core Gravitational lens effects Emitted radiation. A black hole is what remains when a massive star dies and its matter is squished together into an incredibly tiny space.

How many black holes are there? If that sounds like a disappointing — and painful — answer, then it is to be expected. Ever since Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity was considered to have predicted black holes by linking space-time with the action of gravity, it has been known that black holes result from the death of a massive star leaving behind a small, dense remnant core.

Assuming this core has more than roughly three-times the mass of the sun , gravity would overwhelm to such a degree that it would fall in on itself into a single point, or singularity, understood to be the black hole's infinitely dense core.

The resulting uninhabitable black hole would have such a powerful gravitational pull that not even light could avoid it. So, should you then find yourself at the event horizon — the point at which light and matter can only pass inward, as proposed by the German astronomer Karl Schwarzschild — there is no escape. According to Massey, tidal forces would reduce your body into strands of atoms or 'spaghettification', as it is also known and the object would eventually end up crushed at the singularity.

The idea that you could pop out somewhere — perhaps at the other side — seems utterly fantastical. Or is it? Over the years scientists have looked into the possibility that black holes could be wormholes to other galaxies. They may even be, as some have suggested, a path to another universe. Such an idea has been floating around for some time: Einstein teamed up with Nathan Rosen to theorise bridges that connect two different points in space-time in But it gained some fresh ground in the s when physicist Kip Thorne — one of the world's leading experts on the astrophysical implications of Einstein's general theory of relativity — raised a discussion about whether objects could physically travel through them.

But it doesn't seem likely that wormholes exist. Indeed, Thorne, who lent his expert advice to the production team for the Hollywood movie Interstellar, wrote: "We see no objects in our universe that could become wormholes as they age," in his book "The Science of Interstellar" W.

Norton and Company, Thorne told Space. But, the problem is that we can't get up close to see for ourselves. Once you cross the threshold to form a black hole, everything inside the event horizon crunches down No three-dimensional structures can survive intact. For objects outside the black hole, however, there's still plenty of trouble. Because black holes are such massive objects, when you get close to one, you start to experience significant tidal forces.

You might be most familiar with tidal forces from the Moon and how it interacts with Earth. Sure, on average, you can treat the Moon as a point mass and the Earth as a point mass, separated by the relatively large distance of , kilometers or so. But in actuality, the Earth isn't a point, but an object that occupies a real, given volume. Parts of the Earth will be closer to the Moon than others; parts will be farther away. The closer parts will experience a greater gravitational attraction than average; the more distant parts will experience a lesser attraction than average.

From anywhere on the surface of a physical object, there will be a force pulling it in the direction Different points along that object will experience slightly different forces, resulting in a net tidal force: the differences between the force on the individual points versus the average net force on the entire object. But there's more than just the fact that parts of the Earth are closer and parts are farther away from the Moon.

Like all physical objects, the Earth is three-dimensional, which means the "top" and "bottom" areas of the Earth from the Moon's point of view will get pulled inwards, towards the center of the Earth, relative to the portions located in the middle. All told, if we subtract out the average force experienced by every point on the Earth, we can see how all the various points on the surface experience the external forces from the Moon differently.

These force lines map out the relative forces an object experiences, and explain why objects that experience tides get stretched along the direction of the force and compressed perpendicular to the direction of the force.

The force at the center of the object will equate to the average net force, while different points This results in a 'spaghettifying' effect. The closer you get to a massive object, the larger these tidal forces become; the tidal forces get larger even faster than the gravitational force does! Because black holes are both extremely massive and extremely compact, they generate the largest-known tidal forces in the Universe.

This is why, as you approach a black hole, you find yourself getting "spaghettified," or stretched into a thin, noodle-like shape. Based on this, it's easy to see why you'd expect black holes to suck you in: the closer you get to one, the stronger the attractive force of gravity gets and the stronger the tidal forces tearing you apart get.

For an LHC-mass black hole, these forces are inconsequential, as they're negligibly small, but for black holes like the type at our galaxy's center, tidal forces close to the event horizon can be enormous.

Still, the idea that you'll get sucked into a black hole remains a misconception, and a doozy of one at that. Every single particle that makes up an object affected by a black hole is still subject to the same laws of physics, including the gravitational curvature of spacetime generated by General Relativity.

Beyond a certain region, not even light can escape the powerful tug of a black hole's gravity. And anything that ventures too close—be it star, planet, or spacecraft—will be stretched and compressed like putty in a theoretical process aptly known as spaghettification. There are four types of black holes : stellar, intermediate, supermassive, and miniature. The most commonly known way a black hole forms is by stellar death. As stars reach the ends of their lives, most will inflate, lose mass, and then cool to form white dwarfs.

But the largest of these fiery bodies, those at least 10 to 20 times as massive as our own sun, are destined to become either super-dense neutron stars or so-called stellar-mass black holes.

In their final stages, enormous stars go out with a bang in massive explosions known as supernovae. Such a burst flings star matter out into space but leaves behind the stellar core. While the star was alive, nuclear fusion created a constant outward push that balanced the inward pull of gravity from the star's own mass.

In the stellar remnants of a supernova, however, there are no longer forces to oppose that gravity, so the star core begins to collapse in on itself. If its mass collapses into an infinitely small point, a black hole is born. Packing all of that bulk—many times the mass of our own sun—into such a tiny point gives black holes their powerful gravitational pull. Thousands of these stellar-mass black holes may lurk within our own Milky Way galaxy.

Supermassive black holes, predicted by Einstein's general theory of relativity, can have masses equal to billions of suns; these cosmic monsters likely hide at the centers of most galaxies.

The tiniest members of the black hole family are, so far, theoretical. These small vortices of darkness may have swirled to life soon after the universe formed with the big bang, some Astronomers also suspect that a class of objects called intermediate-mass black holes exist in the universe, although evidence for them is so far debatable.