Chapter Six: Black Holes

A black hole is an often a misunderstood term. It is not really a hole. A black hole is just a really tiny star whose mass equals ∞ and volume equals 0. Let me explain. A Black hole is formed when a star of reaches 30 solar masses collapses. A solar mass is 1,988,920,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 kilograms or 1.98892 X 10³⁰. Thirty solar masses are known as Chandrasekhar’s limit. Anything that is above that collapses before it can throw off enough mass or explode (Supernova) will become a black hole. During the time of Chandrasekhar’s, the 20^th century, people thought that a star shrinking down to one point was impossible, even Einstein thought so. But Chandrasekhar was right.

As the tension of the uncertainty principle and gravitational work against each other in big stars, gravity wins and reduces the star to one point. Because the mass is pulled to one singularity, which is impossible, all the laws of science break down. Time slows down. Light, which is both a particle and wave, gets pulled towards the star making it look like a blank spot in space. The light and matter pulled toward the star forms a one-way tube into the black hole that also blocks the singularity from view and is called the event horizon. If anybody were to be on the star at that time they would experience a process called spaghettification. Since the pull on their legs is always stronger than on their head, the person would be pulled apart.

It was often wondered what a naked singularity (without an event horizon blocking out the view) would look like. But before I can explain what it would look like, you must understand gravitational waves. Imagine a cork bobbing in water. The heavier the object, the more gravitational waves would be let out carrying away the energy to make the object a stationary non-rotating object. Just like the cork. When it hits the water it first bobs as water waves carry its energy away. Eventually it will sink as the water waves have carried all its energy away. For a real black hole to form, it should be exactly spherical according to Werner Israel. He said all black holes had to be spherical which meant that the original star must have been exactly spherical. That is impossible. Roger Penrose and John Wheeler said that while the star was becoming a black hole many gravitational waves would carry so much energy away that the black hole would end up perfectly spherical!

There has been many doubters of the black hole theory but there is proof in stars such as Cygnus X-1. The star seems to be rotating around some unseen companion, which is assumed to be a black hole. There exist giant amounts of red-shift energy sources that are just too powerful to be black holes. They are called quasars and are supermassive black holes in the center of a galaxy, which is on the path to destruction. But it might actually be easier to detect small black holes than the supermassives and you’ll find out why in chapter 7!