Black Hole

A black hole is a region of spacetime exhibiting such strong gravitational effects that nothing—not
even particles and electromagnetic radiation such as light—can escape from inside it.[6] The theory of general
relativity predicts that a sufficiently compact mass can deform spacetime to form a black hole.[7][8] The boundary of the
region from which no escape is possible is called the event horizon. Although the event horizon has an enormous
effect on the fate and circumstances of an object crossing it, no locally detectable features appear to be
observed.[9] In many ways a black hole acts like an ideal black body, as it reflects no light.[10][11] Moreover, quantum
field theory in curved spacetime predicts that event horizons emit Hawking radiation, with the same spectrum as a
black body of a temperature inversely proportional to its mass. This temperature is on the order of billionths of a
kelvin for black holes of stellar mass, making it essentially impossible to observe.
Objects whose gravitational fields are too strong for light to escape were first considered in the 18th century by John
Michell and Pierre-Simon Laplace.[12] The first modern solution of general relativity that would characterize a black
hole was found by Karl Schwarzschild in 1916, although its interpretation as a region of space from which nothing can
escape was first published by David Finkelstein in 1958. Black holes were long considered a mathematical curiosity;
it was during the 1960s that theoretical work showed they were a generic prediction of general relativity. The
discovery of neutron stars by Jocelyn Bell Burnell in 1967 sparked interest in gravitationally collapsed compact
objects as a possible astrophysical reality.
Black holes of stellar mass are expected to form when very massive stars collapse at the end of their life cycle. After
a black hole has formed, it can continue to grow by absorbing mass from its surroundings. By absorbing other stars
and merging with other black holes, supermassive black holes of millions of solar masses (M☉) may form. There is
general consensus that supermassive black holes exist in the centers of most galaxies.
Despite its invisible interior, the presence of a black hole can be inferred through its interaction with other matter and
with electromagnetic radiation such as visible light. Matter that falls onto a black hole can form an external accretion
disk heated by friction, forming some of the brightest objects in the universe. If there are other stars orbiting a black
hole, their orbits can be used to determine the black hole's mass and location. Such observations can be used to
exclude possible alternatives such as neutron stars. In this way, astronomers have identified numerous stellar black
hole candidates in binary systems, and established that the radio source known as Sagittarius A*, at the core of
the Milky Way galaxy, contains a supermassive black hole of about 4.3 million solar masses.
On 11 February 2016, the LIGO collaboration announced the first direct detection of gravitational waves, which also
represented the first observation of a black hole merger. [13] As of December 2018, eleven gravitational wave
events have been observed that originated from ten merging black holes (along with one binary neutron star
merger).[14][15] On 10 April 2019, the first ever direct image of a black hole and its vicinity was published, following
observations made by the Event Horizon Telescope in 2017 of the supermassive black hole in Messier 87's galactic
centre.[3][16]
References
1. ^ Oldham, L. J.; Auger, M. W. (March 2016). "Galaxy structure from multiple tracers – II. M87 from parsec to megaparsec
scales". Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. 457 (1): 421–
439. arXiv:1601.01323. Bibcode:2016MNRAS.457..421O. doi:10.1093/mnras/stv2982.
2. ^ Overbye, Dennis (10 April 2019). "Black Hole Picture Revealed for the First Time – Astronomers at last have captured
an image of the darkest entities in the cosmos – Comments". The New York Times. Retrieved 10 April 2019.
3. ^ Jump up to:a b c Event Horizon Telescope, The (2019). "First M87 Event Horizon Telescope Results. I. The Shadow of
the Supermassive Black Hole". The Astrophysical Journal. 87 (1). doi:10.3847/2041-8213/ab0ec7.
4. ^ Landau, Elizabeth (10 April 2019). "Black Hole Image Makes History". NASA. Retrieved 10 April 2019.
5. ^ Anon (11 April 2019). "The woman behind first black hole image". bbc.co.uk. BBC News.
6. ^ Wald 1984, pp. 299–300
7. ^ Jump up to:a b Wald, R. M. (1997). "Gravitational Collapse and Cosmic Censorship". In Iyer, B. R.; Bhawal, B. Black
Holes, Gravitational Radiation and the Universe. Springer. pp. 69–86. arXiv:gr-qc/9710068. doi:10.1007/978-94-017-
0934-7. ISBN 978-9401709347.
8. ^ Overbye, Dennis (8 June 2015). "Black Hole Hunters". NASA. Archived from the original on 9 June 2015. Retrieved 8
June 2015.
9. ^ "Introduction to Black Holes". Retrieved 26 September 2017.
10. ^ Schutz, Bernard F. (2003). Gravity from the ground up. Cambridge University Press. p. 110. ISBN 978-0-521-45506-
0. Archived from the original on 2 December 2016.
11. ^ Davies, P. C. W. (1978). "Thermodynamics of Black Holes" (PDF). Reports on Progress in Physics. 41 (8): 1313–
1355. Bibcode:1978RPPh...41.1313D. doi:10.1088/0034-4885/41/8/004. Archived from the original (PDF) on 10 May
2013.
12. ^ Jump up to:a b c Montgomery, Colin; Orchiston, Wayne; Whittingham, Ian (2009). "Michell, Laplace and the origin of the
black hole concept". Journal of Astronomical History and Heritage. 12(2): 90–96. Bibcode:2009JAHH...12...90M.
13. ^ Jump up to:a b c d Abbott, B.P.; et al. (2016). "Observation of Gravitational Waves from a Binary Black Hole
Merger". Phys. Rev. Lett. 116 (6):
061102. arXiv:1602.03837. Bibcode:2016PhRvL.116f1102A. doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.116.061102. PMID 26918975.
14. ^ Siegel, Ethan. "Five Surprising Truths About Black Holes From LIGO". Forbes. Retrieved 12 April 2019.
15. ^ Jump up to:a b "Detection of gravitational waves". LIGO. Retrieved 9 April 2018.
16. ^ Bouman, Katherine L.; Johnson, Michael D.; Zoran, Daniel; Fish, Vincent L.; Doeleman, Sheperd S.; Freeman, William
T. (2016). "Computational Imaging for VLBI Image Reconstruction": 913–
922. arXiv:1512.01413. doi:10.1109/CVPR.2016.105. hdl:1721.1/103077.