Black Holes - how they are formed, how many there are, what properties thay have etc.

BLACK HOLES

Mike Carey

Scientists have been trying to determine if black holes (earlier known as `frozen

stars') truly do exist for several decades now. Thanks to the great Albert Einstein and his

theory of relativity, researchers have been able to predict the cosmic phenomenon of black

holes. A black hole is basically an area of space that has an unbelievably high area of

concentrated mass for the space it occupies, making it impossible for an object to escape

its gravitational pull. This is due to escape velocity; the velocity required to exit an

object's gravitational pull (The Earth's escape velocity is 11.2 km/s). Because black holes

are so dense and massive the gravitational pull they possess captures light itself, making it

impossible to ever escape a black hole (for nothing as of yet is faster than the speed of

light).

Although the idea of light being trapped in such a dense object dates back to

Laplaze in the 18th century, it wasn't until Einstein developed general relativity that Karl

Schwarzschild derived a mathematical solution to describe such an object.

Simulated view of a black hole in front of the Lar...

The supermassive black holes are all that remains ...

larger animation

This lead to

further work by great minds such as Oppenheimer, Volkoff and Snyder who supported the

idea that such objects could exist in the universe. Their research led them to believe that

when a massive star runs out of fuel and is no longer able to support itself against its own

gravitational pull that it will collapse into itself to form a black hole.

Something that black holes possess due to the fact that their massiveness distorts

space and time making obsolete usual rules of geometry are `event horizons'. These can

be considered the perimeter of black holes as it marks the boundary line where the escape

velocity is equal to the speed of light. Anything inside the event...