Blackholes

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-Vaidehi Watwe
What are Black holes?
Black holes are among the strangest things in the universe.
They are massive objects – collections of mass – with gravity
so strong that nothing can escape, not even light. The most
common types of black holes are the stellar-mass and
supermassive black holes. Stellar-mass black holes are
created when massive stars explode, leaving behind a
black hole with the mass of just a few suns. Supermassive
black holes exist in the hearts of galaxies and usually
contain the mass equivalent of millions of suns.

FACTS:
The massive gravitational influence of a black hole
distorts space and time in the near neighborhood. The
closer you get to a black hole, the slower time runs.
Material that gets too close to a black hole gets sucked
in and can never escape.
Material spirals in to a black hole through an accretion
disk — a disk of gas, dust, stars and planets that fall into
orbit the black hole.
Black holes were first proposed to exist in the 18th
century, but remained a mathematical curiosity until
the first candidate black hole was found in 1964. It was
 called Cygnus X-1, an x-ray source in the constellation
Cygnus.
Cygnus X-1: a stellar-mass black hole and x-ray source
that lies some 6,500 light-years away. It is a binary
system that contains a blue supergiant variable star
and the x-ray source thought to be the black hole.
Just as a clock runs a bit slower closer to sea level than
up on a space station, clock run really slow near black
holes. It all has to do with gravity.
It’s 30,000 light years away and is over 30 million times
as massive as our sun.
The reason it is called a “black” hole is because it sucks
up all the light that hits its border and reflects nothing.
Formed when an amply compact mass deforms space
and time, a black hole has a defined surface known as
the “event horizon” which marks the point of no return.
Black Holes Eventually Evaporate Over Time:
Physicists now believe that black holes actually radiate small
numbers of mainly photon particles and so can lose mass,
shrink then ultimately vanish over time. This unverified
evaporation process is known as “Hawking Radiation”, after
Professor Stephen Hawking who theorized its existence in
1974. However, it is a staggeringly slow process and only the
smallest black holes would have had time to evaporate
significantly during the 14 billion years the Universe has
existed.
 Albert Einstein first predicted black holes in 1916 with his
general theory of relativity. The term "black hole" was
coined in 1967 by American astronomer John Wheeler,
and the first one was discovered in 1971. There are
three types: stellar black holes, supermassive black
holes and intermediate black holes.
A black hole is a sphere in the sense that everything
that goes within its Schwarzschild radius (the distance
from the center of the black hole to the event horizon)
cannot escape its gravity. Thus, there is a dark sphere
around the infinitely dense center, or singularity, from
which nothing can escape.
A black hole is a mathematically defined region of
spacetime exhibiting such a strong gravitational pull
that no particle or electromagnetic radiation can
escape from it. The theory of general relativity predicts
that a sufficiently compact mass can deform
spacetime to form a black hole.

History of Black Holes:

A crucial area of study was stellar evolution. The
gravitational collapse of a normal star such as our sun is
prevented by nuclear burning. As its fuel is used up, the
star must contract, and many end as white dwarfs.
These are about the size of the earth but with masses
comparable to that of the sun--thus with densities of
thousands of tons per cubic inch.
1931. The first relativistic model of the interior of a white
dwarf, by the astrophysicist S. Chandrasekhar,
produced a simple curve relating its mass and radius.
Surprisingly, the larger the mass the smaller the radius. In
fact, if the mass is more than about 1.2 solar masses the
radius is so small that the star cannot stabilize: further
collapse is inevitable.

1939. The first theoretical appearance of black holes, in

a paper by Robert Openheimer and H. Snyder: "When
all thermonuclear sources of energy are exhausted, a
sufficiently heavy star will collapse. Unless [something
can somehow] reduce the star's mass to the order of
that of the sun, this contraction will continue
indefinitely"...past white dwarfs, past neutron stars, to an
object cut off from communication with the rest of the
universe.

1968-1978. From the 1960s theoretical and astronomical

evidence mounted for the existence of black holes,
including very massive ones formed by the collapse of
great clusters of stars at the center of galaxies.
Speculatively, the high densities following the big bang
may have formed primordial holes, including tiny ones.
But even for single collapsing stars their wide variety of
physical properties might be expected to produce a
diversity of black holes. However, a series of results
principally by Werner Israel, Brandon Carter, Stephen
Hawking, and David Robinson leads to the conclusion
that a collapsing star loses its individual characteristics,
settling down to a final state uniquely determined by
mass and rate of rotation--thus leaving the Kerr model
as the prime black hole of nature.

In 1915, Albert Einstein developed his theory of general

relativity, having earlier shown that gravity does
influence light's motion. Only a few months later, Karl
Schwarzschild found a solution to the Einstein field
equations, which describes the gravitational field of a
point mass and a spherical mass.[11] A few months
after Schwarzschild, Johannes Droste, a student of
Hendrik Lorentz, independently gave the same solution
for the point mass and wrote more extensively about its
properties.[12][13] This solution had a peculiar behavior
at what is now called the Schwarzschild radius, where it
became singular, meaning that some of the terms in
the Einstein equations became infinite. The nature of
this surface was not quite understood at the time.

Firstly, the force of gravitation would be so great that

light would be unable to escape from it, the rays falling
back to the star like a stone to the earth.

In 1931, Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar calculated,

using special relativity, that a non-rotating body of
electron-degenerate matter above a certain limiting
 mass (now called the Chandrasekhar limit at 1.4 M☉)
has no stable solutions. His arguments were opposed by
many of his contemporaries like Eddington and Lev
Landau, who argued that some yet unknown
mechanism would stop the collapse.[18] They were
partly correct: a white dwarf slightly more massive than
the Chandrasekhar limit will collapse into a neutron star,
which is itself stable because of the Pauli exclusion
principle. But in 1939, Robert Oppenheimer and others
predicted that neutron stars above approximately 3 M
☉ (the Tolman–Oppenheimer–Volkoff limit) would
collapse into black holes for the reasons presented by
Chandrasekhar, and concluded that no law of physics
was likely to intervene and stop at least some stars from
collapsing to black holes.

-A simple illustration of a non-

spinning black hole.

Why do the black holes spin?

A rotating black hole is a black hole that possesses
angular momentum. In particular, it rotates about one
of its axes of symmetry.
There are four known, exact, black hole solutions to
Einstein's equations, which describe gravity in General
Relativity. Two of these (the Kerr and Kerr–Newman
black holes) rotate. It is generally believed that every
black hole decays rapidly to a stable black hole; and,
by the no-hair theorem, that (except for quantum
fluctuations) stable black holes can be completely
described at any moment in time.
Rotating black holes are formed in the gravitational
collapse of a massive spinning star or from the collapse
of a collection of stars or gas with a total non-zero
angular momentum. As most stars rotate it is expected
that most black holes in nature are rotating black holes.
In late 2006, astronomers reported estimates of the spin
rates of black holes in the Astrophysical Journal. A
black hole in the Milky Way, GRS 1915+105, may rotate
1,150 times per second,[1] approaching the theoretical
upper limit.

-Two physical relevant surfaces of the Kerr black hole.

Images: