Don't let the name fool you black holes are not just empty areas in space think of a massive star and squeeze that into the area about the size of New York. The result is a black hole. Black holes are regions in space having a gravitational field so intense that no matter or radiation can escape. The term black hole was not coined till 1967 by a John Wheeler. The idea that an object in space has the gravitational power where light could not even escape. The black hole was predicted by Einstein’s theory of general relativity, which showed that when a star dies, it leaves behind a small, dense remnant core. If the core's mass is more than about three times the mass of the star, the equations showed, the force of gravity overwhelms all other forces and produces a black hole. With black holes you can not directly see them with but you can see the light refracting around them. This happens because with a black hole no light can escape the force of the gravity that is pulling inwards. So in other words you can not see the light in it only around it that is how we are able to tell that there is a black hole in that location or the area in space we are looking.
Now there are three types of black holes:
1. Stellar Black Holes
2. Supermassive Black holes
3. Miniature Black holes
Now these three types of black holes are the same because they are all a region in space having an infinitely growing gravitational force but they are also very different in many ways too. They may all seem the same but in many ways they are different too.
These are the most common types of black holes in that they come from stars, not just any stars supermassive stars. These types of black holes form when a supermassive star goes supernova where the fuel that the star was unable to fuse any more so it exploded and what is left is either a Neutron star or a black hole, but in our case it is a black hole. One way that astronomers see these types of black holes is in a binary star system where one of the two stars turns into a black hole and starts to take some of the matter from the other star because the other star got to close to the event horizon of the black hole.
As of right now all we know about supermassive black holes is that we can tell they might be at the center of galaxies because there are jets of gravitational forces in the center of the galaxies and it might be at the center of our galaxy too. The way astrophysicist think that supermassive black holes grow is when stuff gets to close to them it heats up and we can see this by the accretion disk that is around them and their motion. Soon to be consumed by the black hole.
The way we think miniature black holes were made was when the big bang happened. The miniature black hole has an accretion disk the size of an atomic particle. The miniature black holes may have formed 10 to 20 million years ago when the big bang created the universe. As of right now we think that when the big bang happened some parts may have have expanded more rapidly than other parts, compressing some matter and squeezing it into miniature black holes. That is what we think miniature black holes are.
So as of right we do not know much about any of the black holes other than the stellar black hole and in the near future we should be learning more about black holes and any other things we do not know about space.
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Sources:
NASA. NASA, n.d. Web. 16 Mar.2017. https://science.nasa.gov/astrophysics/focus-areas/black-holes
"Black Holes - Types." Black Holes - Types. N.p., n.d. Web. 16 Mar. 2017 http://amazingspace.org/resources/explorations/blackholes/lesson/whatisit/types.html
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