Take Stuff: Black Holes

By Debby Lee '21

Take stuff. Take so much stuff––specifically, star stuff––and stuff it all, as much as you can into one tightly packed and infinitely small point. Condense within a center of gravity so strong it bends gravity itself and BOOM! One black hole at your service!

You’ve probably already heard things about them, as the concept of black holes has always been a mystery snatched up by our society within science, media, and even everyday life. The tale of spaghettification told as a funny threat in 3rd grade, the several thousand YouTube videos solely dedicated to the idea to its mystery, the plotline of Interstellar… you get the message. But what exactly are they?

Honestly put, black holes are just a point in space with a density so large that it creates a gravitational pull strong enough to even trap light within its pull. The sheer density, as NASA put, is approximately similar to, “...a star ten times more massive than the Sun squeezed into a sphere approximately the diameter of New York City.” Its mass even causes deep gravity sinks––just imagine a 500 lb. metal ball in the middle of a trampoline.

And it all begins with a star. Black holes are commonly created by supernova explosions from massive stars that have deflated and have lost their mass. The explosion flings out chunks and remnants of what was left of the star and leaves behind its stellar core. Without the push force created by nuclear fission to balance out the pull of gravity, there is theoretically nothing to keep the core from collapsing in on itself and its unchecked gravitational pull. Once that collapsed material condenses into an infinitely small point, there you have it! The birth of a new black hole.

Size also matters, black hole wise, as supermassive black holes are predicted to have masses equal to billions of suns. Smaller black holes, or “stellar-mass” black holes, have yet to push past theoretical reasoning as they are near impossible to detect, even with their mass being ten to twenty-four times larger than our sun. Recent observations have led to speculation of intermediate-mass black holes as well.

Because they suck up all light, it is impossible to peer within, or even at, a black hole. Only by viewing its surroundings and the effects of possible nearby star destruction is a black hole’s location can be inferred. The heat of the gas and dust caused by the massive gravitational forces emit radiation and can cause a circle of glowing matter to surround and envelop the hole itself in what is called an accretion disk. This image is probably what you are most familiar to associating with an image of a black hole.

It could be a wormhole leading to a whole new universe, parallel universes, or solely just a dense point of matter that will stretch and compress your atoms the second you pass its event horizon. Whatever the case, black holes will always pull at societies’ inner curiosity as much as it pulls on the light itself.

“Black Holes.” NASA, NASA, science.nasa.gov/astrophysics/focus-areas/black-holes.

Wei-Haas, Maya. “Black Holes, Explained.” What Is a Black Hole?, 17 Sept. 2019, www.nationalgeographic.com/science/space/universe/black-holes/.