WHAT IS A BLACK HOLE? DOES IT SWALLOW EVERYTHING?

                                            BLACK HOLES

Many things have been written about black holes. It has been featured in movies, series, even books but does it deserve to be such phenomenon? We will now share with you all of the information about black holes. First we start with this question: What is a black hole?

Black hole is remnant of a dead star. When stars die, they turn into different forms; some become pulsar, some become white dwarf etc. It is the star’s mass that determines which form the star will turn into. The more mass the star has, the more powerful the explosion will be when it dies. Young stars fuse hydrogen into helium and then they start to burn helium. This fusion process continues up to iron. Stars can’t burn anything after iron because they don’t have the required energy. After that, the star starts to get colder and collapse into its core. After quite a while, the collapsed and pressed iron increases the inner pressure. After the pressure is increased, an explosion occurs from the core to outside. Those explosions are what we call supernova.

During black hole formation resulted from supernova explosion, the star starts to spin very fast and eject mass from its magnetic poles after it has supernova explosions. At this point, there becomes a very powerful gravitational force in the core of the star. This gravitational force is so strong that you cannot escape it even if your velocity is equal to that of light.

Escape velocity is the speed needed to break free of a planet’s gravitational force. Escape velocity of an object leaving Earth is 11.2 km/h (nearly 7mph).

After the supernova explosions, the remains of the dead star whose gravity is very strong that even light cannot escape are called black hole. Not being able to get light from black holes made them hard to discover. Before mentioning discovery, let’s answer the question “Do they swallow everything?” Black holes have high gravitational pull whose range is influenced by the black hole’s mass. The more mass it has, the greater the range will be. When black holes pull anything near them, something called ‘spaghettification’ occurs. To better understand gravitational pull, let’s give the example of Einstein’s space bend.

Imagine a curtain stretched out by its four corners. Put a marble to its center, it will collapse a little. But put a bowling ball to its center, it will collapse much more. Black holes uses the same principle to bend space. They pull everything that has less mass than them. That’s why we say ‘black holes swallow everything. Black holes’ pulling everything that is in their gravitational range played a very important role in discovering them. Although there are many hypotheses about black holes, it will take a very long time for us to have detailed information and for these hypotheses to become theories. Because our technology is not advanced enough to understand black holes.

When black holes swallow the surrounding objects, these objects are accumulated in accretion disk. The temperature of the objects in accretion disk rises after accumulation. Black holes are discovered by the risen temperature through various wavelength studies.

Author: Spaceweather

Interpreter: Ali AYRAN
Editor: Ercan YÖRÜK