Once considered a mathematical curiosity, black holes have taken center stage in cosmology

A Singular Place

This image displays a giant elliptical galaxy known as NGC 1275. It's also a wellknown radio source called Perseus A and it's one of the brightest emitters of X-rays in
the northern sky due to the presence of a supermassive black hole in the galaxy's
central region. At a distance of 230 million light-years from Earth, NGC 1275 resides
near the center of the Perseus galaxy cluster. The jets and red filaments transfer
energy from the galaxy's super massive black hole to the material that surrounds it.
by R. Jay GaBany

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Stretching the Fabric of Space

Ask any kid about the coolest thing they've learned in science. If they're still in elementary
school, they'll tell you about dinosaurs, particularly the T Rex. By the time they're in middle
school, however, a different kind of carnivore will be high on their list. But this one doesn't
have legs and nine inch teeth. This monster preys on galaxies.

German astrophysicist Karl Schwarzschild calculated the first rigorous solution to the
field equations in Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity while serving on the
Russian front during World War 1.
Photo credit: Wikipedia Commons

When Einstein developed relativity theory, it took him about ten years to work out the math
using a daunting form of mathematics called tensor calculus. He was only able to
approximate the solutions to his own equations and the math still perplexes even the best
scientific brains. However, the challenge did nothing to deter one of Einstein's contemporary
astronomers- a theoretical physicist named Karl Schwarzschild. Schwarzschild was a
practical individual by nature. He pioneered new methods of studying spectra, for example.
But he excelled in his abilities to deal with theoretical concepts and when Einstein's articles
on general relativity were published in 1915, Schwarzschild was one of the first to recognize
their importance.
Schwarzschild was also a German patriot, so he set aside his astronomical studies when
World War 1 erupted and enlisted in the army. By the time he had read Einstein's papers, he
had already seen action in Belgium, France and on the Russian front. Nonetheless, he was
attracted to the essentialness of general relativity and began to seek exact answers for its
equations. Two months after contracting a life threatening disease and being sent home to
recuperate, Schwarzschild was finally able to concentrate on completing his calculations.
Shortly before his death in 1916, Schwarzschild completed his work and it was published
later the same year. Titled On the Field of Gravity of a Point Mass in the Theory of Einstein,
it became one of the pillars of modern relativistic studies and in it Schwarzschild presented
his solutions to Einstein's unfinished equations.
Significantly, it provided support for a, then, seemingly implausible situation about the effects
of severely compressed matter on gravity and energy.

Just as a bowling ball placed on a trampoline stretches the fabric and causes it to
dimple or sag, so planets and stars warp space-time - a phenomenon known as the
'geodetic effect'. Thus the planets orbiting the Sun are not being pulled by the Sun;
they are following the curved space-time deformation caused by the Sun.
Photo credit: WGBH Boston

When Einstein wrote his general theory of relativity, he found a new way to describe gravity.
It was not a force, as Sir Isaac Newton had proposed, but a consequence of a distortion in
space and time, conceived together in his theory as 'space-time'. According to Einstein, matter
and energy exist on a background of space and time. There are three spatial dimensions
(backwards-forwards, left-right and up-down) and one time dimension (which flows at one
second per second). Objects distort the fabric of space-time based on their mass- more
massive objects have a greater effect.
Just as a bowling ball placed on a trampoline stretches the fabric and causes it to dimple or
sag, so planets and stars warp space-time - a phenomenon known as the 'geodetic effect'. A
marble rolling across the trampoline will be inexorably drawn towards the bowling ball. Thus
the planets orbiting the Sun are not being pulled by the Sun; they are following the curved
space-time deformation caused by the Sun. The reason the planets never fall into the Sun is
due to the speed at which they are traveling. The astrophysicist, John Archibald Wheeler,
who coined the name "Black Hole", said it succinctly: "matter tells Space-Time how to curve,
and Space-Time tells matter how to move."
Schwarzschild realized the escape velocity from the surface of an object depends on both its
mass and radius. For example, the escape velocity of the Earth is about 11.2 kilometers per
second- this is the speed a rocket must attain before it can depart the Earth on a journey to the
Moon or more distant planets. The Moon's escape velocity, however, is only 2.4 kilometers
per second because the Moon is one fourth the size of our planet and possesses only slightly
more than 1% of its mass. But, if nature can make the radius of a given mass small enough,
the escape velocity will increase until it reaches the speed of light, or 300,000 kilometres
(186,000 miles) per second. At that point, neither matter nor radiation can escape from the
object's surface. Additionally, atomic or subatomic forces become incapable of holding the
object up against its own weight. Therefore, the object collapses into an infinitesimal pointthe original object disappears from view and only its gravity remains to mark its presence. As
a result, it creates a bottomless pit in the fabric of space-time.

Image credit: John

Hawley (Univ of Virginia) & Andrew Hamilton

Near the event horizon
While black holes, themselves, are invisible, their presence exerts a powerful
gravitational force on nearby gas and stars, causing everything to orbit at tremendous

speeds. As the matter nears the event horizon, it accelerates until it approaches the
speed of light and in the process acquires tremendous energy. Some of this energy is
converted into radiation.
For example, the material forms an accretion disk around the black hole. Friction
within the disk heats it to extremely high temperatures causing it to become extremely
bright. So, even though a black hole is invisible, its accretion disk makes it presence
observationally evident. Some of the material within the disk reaches sufficient speed
that it escapes being pulled into the event horizon and is thrown around the black hole
emerging as powerful jets of intense energy, one at each pole. These jets are invisible
in white light, but they can be seen in radio frequencies.
When a black hole is in its active phase, it's known as a quasar.
This incredible, scientificaly accurate animation places the viewer inside the accretion
disk of a supermassive black hole. It was created from a supercomputed simulation.

Scientists now refer to an object with zero-volume but all of its mass as a singularity.
Schwarzschild also explained that a singularity was surrounded by a spherical gravitational
boundary that forever trapped anything that ventured within. This boundary was called the
event horizon. He presented a formula that enabled the size of an event horizon to be
calculated. This is now known as the Schwarzschild radius and it marks the edge of a
bottomless pit in space-time. Venture beyond the brink and you will never return.
The formula for the Schwarzschild radius is very straightforward: 3 times M (where "M" is
the mass of the sun and the result is expressed in kilometers). For example, if the Sun were
shrunk to a singularity, it's event horizon would occur at three kilometers above its surface.
Interestingly, it would not disturb the orbit of our planet and we would not suddenly be
sucked into oblivion! Similarly, the Schwarzschild radius of the Earth is a third of an inch: if
the Earth were to be similarly compressed, the sphere of its event horizon would be about the
size of a marble!
However, scientists did not grasp its significance in the role of stellar evolution for about fifty
years and have only recently realized its dramatic impact on the development of the Universe
itself!
Despite the radical predictions contained in Schwarzschild's papers, the scientific community
regarded it as a curiosity rather than outrageous. The idea of a singularity troubled many
scientists, including Einstein, because it flew in the face of their experience- after all, the
world is finite and everything can be weighed and measured.
Leading thinkers of that period could not imagine conditions that would create a singularity
but now we know they are common throughout the Universe. Where? In the fates of massive
stars and at the center of most, if not all, galaxies!

A Singular Place

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The relationship between black holes and

galaxies
Like discovering a neighborhood house assumed to be vacant is actually inhabited, over the
past decade researchers realized that most galaxies have at least one black hole in residence
in their central regions. But these black holes aren't the stellar variety with three to ten times
the mass of our Sun. Their size swamps the imagination- they have millions, sometimes
billions, of solar masses. Even our home galaxy, the Milky Way, has a four million solar mass
black hole located at its center, about 27,000 light years from Earth. Galactically speaking,
that places it in our own backyard! Well, there goes the neighborhood!

At the heart of virtually every large galaxy lurks a supermassive black hole with a
mass of a million to more than a billion times our Sun. Most of these black holes are
dormant, but a few per cent are 'active' meaning that they are drawing material from
their host galaxy inwards, This forms an accretion disc that feeds the black hole.
As the material spirals through the disc toward the event horizon, it gains fantastic
speed and releases vast amounts of energy. As a result, some of the disk material does
not fall in because its speed achieves escape velocity. This material is slung around to
one of the poles and expelled as a powerful jet traveling near the speed of light.

Image credit: Wolfgang Steffen, Cosmovision

We also now know that supermassive black holes are inexorably linked to the galaxies that
encircle them.

For example, the size of a supermassive black hole appears to have a direct correlation to the
galaxy where it exists. Almost a decade ago, researchers calculated that the mass of a
supermassive black hole appeared to have a constant relation to the mass of the central part of
its galaxy, known as its bulge (think of the yolk in a fried egg). This 1 to 700 relationship
supports the notion that the evolution and structure of a galaxy is closely tied to the scale of
its black hole.
Other studies found another strong correlation. This one was between the mass of a
supermassive black hole and the orbital speed of stars in the outer regions of their galaxy
where the direct gravitational influence of the supermassive black hole should be weak: the
larger the black hole, the faster the outer stars travel.
Thus it's now believed that black holes are not only common throughout the Cosmos but they
play a fundamental role in the formation and evolution of the Universe we inhabit today.
In fact, we would not be here without them.
History Galactica
Most astronomers believe that the Universe began about 15 billion years ago with an
explosion known as the Big Bang. All the matter in the Universe, all the space and even time,
itself, was released during this event.
Hundreds of millions of years followed before matter started to collect into vast clouds then
coalesce and collapse, under its own weight, into the first stars.
The first stars were huge, hot and powerful. They consumed vast amounts of material and
therefore only shined for a few hundred million years. For comparison, our Sun has been
shining for over four and a half billion years.
When the nuclear fuel powering the first stars became exhausted, the explosion that followed
threw off material that became incorporated into the next generation of suns. But, due to their
prodigious mass, their cores continued to shrink until they became gigantic black holes,
millions to billions of times more massive than our Sun.
The life of a star
Stars are created when vast clouds of hydrogen gas and other material fall in upon
themselves due to their own weight. This can be provoked by the gravity of a passing
star or the arrival of pressure waves from a supernova explosion that introduces
instability by nudging one side of the cloud. As it collapses, the cloud breaks into
smaller and smaller pieces. In each of these fragments, gravity begins to release heat
energy and the fragment condenses into a rotating sphere of super hot gas known as a
protostar.
Over time, the pressure and temperature within the protostar becomes so intense that a
continuous thurmo- nuclear explosion is triggered. With the onset of this chain
reaction, hydrogen begins to fuse into the next heavier element, helium. The force of
this ongoing, relentless release of energy pushes outward until it reaches an
equilibrium with gravity and, as a result, the cloud stops collapsing. Once the
radiation from the internal explosion reaches the cloud's edge, it escapes into space as

light and thus a star is born.

When the non-stop internal nuclear explosion that powers a star has converted its
hydrogen into helium, the star inflates and begins a new round of energy release by
converting helium into carbon then carbon into oxygen followed by other elements up
the periodic table. In essence, stars are factories that create the material comprising
everything in our world- including ourselves. However, these new fuel sources are
depleted at faster and faster rates until the star begins to produce iron at its core.
Unfortunately, iron cannot be used as nuclear fuel, so the thermonuclear activity at the
star's core begins to shut down. When the core stops releasing enough energy to
prevent the constant crush of gravity from taking over and squeezing it inward, the
star collapses in the wink of an eye. For example, if a star contains less that two or
three times as much material as our Sun, then the force of the sudden inward rush will
rip it apart in an titanic explosion called a supernova. The explosion exposes the star's
core- a dense, city-sized ball of material made only of atomic neutrons- and it slowly
begins to cool.
However, if the star contains more than three times the mass of our Sun, then the star's
core will continue to shrink until it becomes an infinitely small object with all the
mass of its former self. Astronomers call this a black hole- the bottomless pit in the
fabric of space-time that Schwarzschild discovered in Einstein's equations.

These first black holes were both destroyers and creators- swallowing material that came too
close while throwing jets of high-energy particles and radiation generated by their violent
feeding frenzy. The jets, which can be millions of light-years in length, are believed to have
triggered the formation of successive stellar generations and thus seeded the first galaxies
with starlight. Therefore, these original supermassive black holes most likely arose prior to
and helped in the creation of the galaxies that continue to spin about them. They were
essential to galactic evolution (they still are!) and, in the long run, to the creation of our Sun,
our planet and our very existence. They are both the the universal omega and the cosmic
alpha.

Through the event horizon

This amazing animation models the 4 million solar mass supermassive black hole at
the center of our Galaxy, the Milky Way. It places the viewer inside the accretion disk
as they travel towards and through the event horizon.
The graphic on the lower left shows the viewer's position. On the right, the clock
shows the viewer's proper time, in seconds until vaporization by the inflationary
instability at the inner horizon.

The tidal force from the supermassive black hole is weak enough that you can survive
all the way down to the inner horizon without being torn apart.
Image credit: John Hawley (Univ of Virginia) & Andrew Hamilton

Galaxies can be divided into two distinct categories based on the feeding status of their
supermassive central resident. Inactive galaxies, for example, have supermassive black holes
in quiescence- like a satiated cosmic beast, they sleep in between meals. Examples include
our Milky Way galaxy, NGC 3031 (M81), NGC 5457 (M101) and NGC 891.
But dormancy can be temporary. If a star strays too close or a cloud of gas and dust ventures
into the black hole's accretion disc, the black hole will awaken, become active and release
vast amounts of energy and potentially lethal radiation that reverberates throughout its galaxy.
An active galaxy is no place to be or venture near. Examples include NGC 1275 (pictured at
the top of the previous page), NGC 1097, NGC 4258, and NGC 5033.
NGC 4258
Since the early 1960s, NGC 4258, also known as M106, has been known to exhibit an extra
pair of arms, located between the spiral arms comprised of stars, dust and gas. But an
explanation for their existence remained elusive until earlier in this decade. NGC 4258 is
located in the northern constellation of Canes Venatici approximately 21 million light years
from Earth,

Located in the northern constellation of Canes Venatici, NGC 4258 (M106) has been
know to have a mysterious extra set of arms for many decades. Shown here in vivid
red, the extra appendages are now known to be caused by a high energy jet emanating
from the supermassive black hole in the galaxy's center. The jet creates a shock wave
that excites material in the galaxy's halo, seen here in the ionized light emitted by
hydrogen atoms.
Photo credit: R. Jay GaBany Cosmotography.com

Seen in the light emitted by hydrogen molecules when they become ionized, these arms
display an artificial red hue to make them visible in the image that accompanies this article.
The extra arms are now believed to be caused by high energy jets emanating from the
galaxy's active 40 million solar mass central supermassive black hole.
Because the jets are tilted at a low inclination they pierce the disk and surrounding halo of
this galaxy. So, as the jets pass through regions of gas, they create an expanding cocoon of
shock waves that heats the surrounding material causing it to release radiation in optical
wavelengths. The curvature and fraying seen at their extremities represents previous
trajectories of the jet due to past precession. Precession is a change in the orientation of the
rotation axis of a spinning object. For example, the wobble of a spinning top.

Interestingly, water molecules in the accretion disk surrounding the supermassive black hole
at the center of NGC 4258 have become so excited that they amplify microwave radio
emissions in a manner similar to the way in which a laser amplifies light. These powerful
naturally-occurring microwave amplifiers are called masers. The discovery and measurement
of the masers in this galaxy have made distance estimates between Earth and other galaxies
more precise.
NGC 5033
Most galaxies are located in a group with other galaxies and even these are organized into
larger associations called super clusters. They are formed at the junction of large
gravitational bubbles that seem to fill the Universe. Galaxies are in constant motion within
their cluster and, over time, they may approach, collide and combine. This is the way galaxies
grow and evolve- most galaxies have interacted with others at one time or another since they
were formed. Mergers are thought to have contributed significantly to the growth of
galaxies- the early universe was much smaller and incredibly crowded therefore galaxies
were more likely to collide.

The sprial galaxy NGC 5033, located near the northern Big Dipper in the
constellation of Canes Venatici, has two supermassive black holes which indicate that
the star system survived a merger with another galaxy sometime in the past.
Eventually, the black holes will collide releasing titanic amounts of energy causing the
galaxy to become even more disturbed than seen in this recent view.
Photo credit: R. Jay GaBany Cosmotography.com

If two galaxies merge, so should their central black holes. Recent computer modeling
speculates the event would be violent, unleashing tremendous energy as trapped gas rushes
between the two black holes. Galactic mergers take millions of years to complete but there
are plenty of examples for astronomers to study.
For instance, located about 37 million light years from Earth in the constellation of Canes
Venatici NGC 5033 displays evidence of major activity driven, in part, by two supermassive
black holes located in its central region. It's suspected that the second black hole was acquired
sometime in the past when NGC 5033 survived a merger with another galaxy. This merger
resulted in much of the turbulence and apparent chaos taking place inside this star system.
New stars are being born at a furious rate. Over time, the pair of supermassive black holes
will gradually get closer and eventually crash into one another. The dramatic collision will
unleash intense radiation, gravitational waves and ripples in the fabric of space-time as
predicted by Einstein.
The waterfall's edge
Although black holes started as a mathematical curiosity that was tolerated by the established

scientific community of the early twentieth century, over the decades since Einstein
suggested and Schwarzschild revealed their nature, science now sees them as indispensable
forces of creation and the sculptors of mighty galaxies.
But, this new understanding compels some to indulge in a bit of speculation that's evocative,
intriguing and somewhat disquieting. Could it be possible that the Big Bang was simply the
consequence of some universal black hole that accreted all the matter of a previous Universe,
imploded then exploded resulting in the Cosmos where humanmankind exists?
For some, it's not only possible but most likely probable.
For example, imagine crossing the event horizon of a black hole. Like plungling in a basket
over Niagara, once it's crossed there's no hope of return- you will fall into the singularity and
there is nothing that can prevent it. At the same time, you will never receive information from
anything that may have preceded and is located closer to the singularity than your current
position because no information can escape from within. You can only know about where you
are and that which is behind you. Isn't this very similar to the way time functions in our
Universe? While we move forward into tomorrow, there is no way for us to know anything
about it beforehand. We only have knowledge about the present and all our yesterdays.
So, what's it like to journey past a black hole's event horizon? Some would respond, "Simply
look around you."
These ponderings have the earmarks of metaphysical philosophy. Most likely, they can and
never will be provisionally confirmed or completely dismissed. Yet, they stir our blood and
awaken our yearning to pursue the most fundamental questions of all: where did the
Universe, and therefore we ourselves, come from and what waits just over the waterfall's
edge.
End