Black Holes

Rawin Berrocales Rivera 

Black holes where once just a phenomenon of science fiction movies and human imagination. The idea of the existence of a black hole came from Einstein’s theory of gravity and Einstein’s theory of relativity and caused many controversies years after with scientists trying to prove their existence. Today, scientists cannot directly see a black hole but they can see the unmistakable effects that the presence of a black hole causes. 

A black hole is a place in space where gravity pulls so hard that even light cannot escape it. At the edge of a black hole it is said that time appears to slow to a halt and, if it is spinning, space will be twisted therefore carrying any nearby objects around with it. The edge of a black hole is called an event horizon and it marks the point of no return. Once an object is in the event horizon, no outside observer will be able to see if an event where to occur here, and no object that enters it comes out.  

Because a black hole sucks in even light, scientists cannot directly see it but through the use of telescopes they are able to monitor the behavior of objects close to where a black hole is suspected to be. Objects close to a black hole are spiraling into it, heating up to reach millions of degrees where they will glow in X-ray light before being sucked in it. This X-ray light can be seen by an X-ray space telescope and is used to determine the presence of a black hole. Examples of objects that are closely monitored are stars. The rapid movement of a swarm of stars is used as an indicator of the presence of a black hole. Another indicator used to determine the presence of a black hole is a jet of matter. Although it is unknown how black holes create these jets, they are the only known sources powerful enough to cause jets of matter.

All of this is very interesting, but what causes such a powerful celestial body to form? Squeezing an object’s mass into a very tiny volume forms a black hole. Although the object is being forced to collapse in on itself until it’s size is basically nothing, the object continues to have the same mass and gravitational force but in the form of a distorting in space in time, according to Einstein’s theories. In theory, any object can turn into a black hole, but in reality, stars are the only objects that can form a black hole by itself. At the end of a life cycle of any star, the star will collapse and explode. Depending on the mass of the star depends what it will end up as. If the star was massive enough, it will collapse to form a black hole. 

Scientists have been able to make a lot of progress in understanding black holes but there is still a lot to explore. We still don’t know what happens inside an event horizon, much less what happens inside a black hole per say. Some scientists think that inside a black hole time and space switch places and that time is destroyed at the center of the hole, but there is no evidence to support such speculations. Hopefully, in the future, the new generation of scientists is able to answer the questions of where do objects that are sucked into a black hole go, or what happens to them once they reach the center.