There are no classes of object in our Universe more extreme than black holes. With so much mass present in such a tiny volume of space, they create a region around them where the curvature of space is so strong that nothing — not even light — can escape from its gravity once a certain boundary is crossed.
Black holes, the insatiable monsters of the universe, are impossible to kill with any of the weapons in our grasp. The only thing that can hasten a black hole's demise is a cable made of cosmic strings, a hypothetical material predicted by string theory.
Black holes are the largest single objects in the universe, many times larger than even the biggest stars, and have no upper limit to their size.
Beyond the event horizon lies a truly minuscule point called a singularity, where gravity is so intense that it infinitely curves space-time itself. This is where the laws of physics, as we know them, break down, meaning all theories about what lies beyond are just speculation.
Black holes create the strongest gravitational pull in the universe (that we know of). So you really don't want to get very close to one. If you get too close, the pull of gravity from the black hole is so strong that you would never be able to escape, even if you were travelling at the speed of light.
No material that falls inside a black hole could survive intact. Unfortunately, because nothing can escape a black hole's event horizon — not even information — we'll never know for certain what happens when matter falls past the point of no return.
While black holes are mysterious and exotic, they are also a key consequence of how gravity works: When a lot of mass gets compressed into a small enough space, the resulting object rips the very fabric of space and time, becoming what is called a singularity.
Well, even though black holes are extreme in many ways, they don't have infinite mass—and it's mass that determines the force of their gravity.
Black holes aren't, strictly speaking, entirely black. In pure general relativity, with no other modifications or considerations of other physics, they remain black for eternity. Once one forms, it will just hang out there, being a black hole, forever.
A star has survived a close encounter with a black hole, but the black hole has been able to sneak a second bite. A captured star has experienced multiple close encounters with a supermassive black hole in a distant galaxy — and possibly even survived having material ripped away by immense gravitational tidal forces.
Some black holes, called supermassive black holes, may have as much matter as 1000 million Suns! The more matter something has, and the closer an object is to that matter, the stronger the gravity. Earth's gravity is strong enough to keep all of us stuck to the ground.
Supermassive black holes are a million to a billion times more massive than our Sun and are found in the centers of galaxies. Most galaxies, and maybe all of them, harbor such a black hole. So in our region of the Universe, there are some 100 billion supermassive black holes.
Micro black holes, also called mini black holes or quantum mechanical black holes, are hypothetical tiny (<1 M ☉) black holes, for which quantum mechanical effects play an important role.
Its mass, M, is its sensitivity to gravity. So Q > M means gravity is the weaker of the two. From their assumption that black holes ought to be able to decay, the four physicists made a more sweeping conjecture that gravity must be the weakest force in any viable universe.
Supermassive black holes are thought to reside at the center of almost every galaxy. Sometimes they end up destroying their home.
Nothing. Even if it did explode, the energy released in a “nuke” explosion is irrelevant compared to the energy in a Black Hole.
Stellar black holes are very cold: they have a temperature of nearly absolute zero – which is zero Kelvin, or −273.15 degrees Celsius. Supermassive black holes are even colder. But a black hole's event horizon is incredibly hot. The gas being pulled rapidly into a black hole can reach millions of degrees.
A new model suggests how gravitational waves created by the collision between black holes spread and interact within the fabric of space-time. When black holes collide and merge to form even more massive black holes, this violent process sends ripples surging through the very fabric of space.
New black hole simulations that incorporate quantum gravity indicate that when a black hole dies, it produces a gravitational shock wave that radiates information, a finding that could solve the information paradox. Perhaps the most enigmatic objects in the Universe, black holes embody many unsolved paradoxes.
The term dark matter was coined in 1933 by Fritz Zwicky of the California Institute of Technology to describe the unseen matter that must dominate one feature of the universe—the Coma Galaxy Cluster.
While researchers have never found a wormhole in our universe, scientists often see wormholes described in the solutions to important physics equations. Most prominently, the solutions to the equations behind Einstein's theory of space-time and general relativity include wormholes.
A typical stellar-class of black hole has a mass between about 3 and 10 solar masses. Supermassive black holes exist in the center of most galaxies, including our own Milky Way Galaxy. They are astonishingly heavy, with masses ranging from millions to billions of solar masses.
on edge of Black Hole. Space and time are intertwined, called space-time, and gravity has the ability to stretch space-time. Objects with a large mass will be able to stretch space-time to the point where our perception of it changes, known as time dilation.
In fact, the possibility of creating a black hole in a lab is a goal that scientists are actively pursuing—one that could allow researchers to answer many fundamental questions about quantum mechanics and the nature of gravity. A black hole typically forms when a star much more massive than our sun dies.
"When you see things in the really distant Universe, because of the expansion of the Universe, it takes longer for things to happen," she says. The effect is known as cosmological time dilation and it's far more powerful than the tiny time changes seen near Earth.