What Happens to matter Inside a Super Massive Black Hole?

Question

Are objects crushed, do objects come out somewhere else in the universe, or something completely different?

I realize know one knows for sure, but I'm interested in your theories.

Answer 1

Falling into the black hole, the gravity gradient (the difference in the strength of gravity, the further you are from the center) is so powerful that an object even a few feet long will be ripped in half by the tidal forces. Then those prices will be ripped in half, etc. Soon enough the very molecules will be ripped apart, and then the atoms.

And everything keeps falling inward until it reaches the singularity in the center. At which point we don't understand exactly what's going on, except that the mass of the object still exists in this universe, and further contributes to the gravity of the black hole.

There's no reason to believe that surviving matter ever pops out anywhere else (though there is thought to be Hawking radiation just beyond the event horizon) -- if it did, how to explain the fact that its gravitational mass still exists in the black hole?

Answer 2

To try and even describe the mathematics that goes on at the singularity is nearly impossible. But the best description I've heard is that everything has degenerated to a 'quantum foam' . But that would be to an observer inside the singularity. To an outside observer (if they could 'see' inside the event horizon) the singularity would take an infinitely long time to actually form due to the gravitational time-dilation inside the black hole.

Doug

Answer 3

In idea, a black hollow is any concentration of count number such that the gravity is severe adequate to capture even gentle. The spoil out speed is more beneficial than the speed of light. that's plausible to imagine a difficulty the position a huge style of stars are grouped close adequate at the same time (yet with nevertheless adequate separation to stay human being stars -- a minimum of for a couple of minutes) so as that the spoil out speed from the cluster is more beneficial than the speed of light. the position (a floor enveloping the centre of gravity) the position the spoil out speed is precisely the speed of light, is termed the shape horizon. For unmarried a lot (e.g., a huge action picture star that has collapsed as a black hollow), the shape horizon is the outdoors of a sphere with a radius called the Schwarzschild radius. maximum cosmologist have self assurance that our mathematical concept of the universe ameliorations contained in the shape horizon, making distance a a lot less significant idea (anyplace you're contained in the shape horizon -- in case you would possibly want to live on, that you will be able to't -- you would fall for a limiteless era of time earlier reaching the centre of the mass). With the regulations of physics being so diverse, that's problematical to communicate of "count number" and to outline it as being sturdy, liquid or in spite of. some theories guarantee that each one options is lost about the count number that falls right into a black hollow, leaving in undemanding words the mass (and the electric powered fee?). recent observations (see the APOD on the first link decrease than) recommend that there may nicely be a swarm of small black holes orbiting the tremendous one, on the centre of our Galaxy.

Answer 4

2 possibilities:

1. it comes out of a 'white hole' in a parallel universe.
2. it gets crushed in the center of the black hole: the singularity.

Answer 5

it gets sucked in and in and in and in until it is all contained in one single point inside the black hole, called a singularity. That's space AND time.

Answer 6

The most conventional thought is, it condenses to the point-mass of the black hole, and stays put.

Answer 7

wow!..i dont believe the guy above!

gravity is different at different heights from the center of gravity...on earth,when we stand upright,theres a difference in gravity on the highest and lowest point of our body ...but this difference in force goes unnoticed...because gravity on earth itself is comparitively small
but in black holes,the difference in force acting on the topmost and bottom mostpoints is so immense that we get streched apart with phenomenal force,getting ripped off in the process...

Answer 8

It will compress whatever it is to a fly speck of what it is.

Answer 9

General Relativity

General relativity
Introduction to...
Mathematical formulation of...

Fundamental concepts
Special relativity · Equivalence principle
World line · Riemannian geometry

Phenomena
Black hole · Event horizon · Lenses
Waves · Singularity
Frame-dragging

Equations
Linearized Gravity
Einstein field equations

Advanced theories
Kaluza-Klein
Quantum gravity

Solutions
Schwarzschild · Kasner · Kerr
Milne · Reissner-Nordström
Robertson-Walker

Scientists
Einstein · Minkowski · Eddington
Lemaître · Schwarzschild
Robertson · Kerr · Friedman
Chandrasekhar · Hawking · others


This box: view • talk • edit
A black hole is an object with a gravitational field so powerful that even electromagnetic radiation (such as light) cannot escape its pull.[1]

Both Newtonian physics (see below) and Einstein's general relativity predict the existence of black holes, but:

The Newtonian version incorrectly assumes that photons have rest mass (see below).
General relativity tells us a lot more about black holes. For example Newtonian physics explains why an unpowered object cannot escape from a black hole but general relativity also explains why even the most powerful spaceship cannot escape.
Merely having a very large mass is not enough to make a black hole - if it were, most galaxies would be black holes. A black hole consists of mass concentrated into an abnormally small volume. Fortunately Newton's Law of Gravitation is good enough to explain this fairly accurately:

The gravitational pull between two objects is inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them. For example if you halve the distance you quadruple the force, and if you reduce the distance by a factor of 10 you increase the force by a factor of 100.
Newton's shell theorem states that, if the objects have a spherically symmetric distribution of mass (like a perfect ball that rolls without swerving or wobbling), you can simplify the calculations by pretending that their masses are all concentrated at their centers of mass. Stars and many other astronomical objects are very close to spherical, and their mass is quite evenly distributed in layers of decreasing density round their centers, so the simplification works very well for them.
Hence a spherically symmetric object's gravitational pull becomes stronger very rapidly as the distance from its center of mass decreases.
In a normal star or even in a neutron star the radius of the outer surface is so large that the gravitational pull at the surface is not strong enough to prevent light from escaping.
So a black hole can only form if a similar mass is compressed into a much smaller radius - so small that it is not like anything one could reasonably describe as "matter".



Contents [show]
1 Sizes of black holes
2 What makes it impossible to escape from black holes?
3 Do black holes have "no hair"?
4 Types of black hole
5 Major features of non-rotating, uncharged black holes
5.1 Event horizon
5.2 Singularity at a single point
5.3 A photon sphere
5.4 Accretion disk
6 Major features of rotating black holes
6.1 Two event horizons
6.2 Two photon spheres
6.3 Ergosphere
6.4 Ring-shaped singularity
6.5 Possibility of escaping from a rotating black hole
7 What happens when something falls into a black hole
7.1 Spaghettification
7.2 Before the falling object crosses the event horizon
7.3 As the object passes through the event horizon
7.4 Inside the event horizon
7.5 Hitting the singularity
8 Formation and evaporation
8.1 Formation of stellar-mass black holes
8.2 Formation of larger black holes
8.3 Formation of smaller black holes
8.4 Evaporation
9 Evidence of black holes
9.1 Accretion disks and gas jets
9.2 Strong radiation emissions
9.3 Gravitational lensing
9.4 Objects orbiting possible black holes
9.5 Inside the event horizon
10 Simple overview
11 History
12 Evidence
12.1 Formation and size
12.2 Observation
12.3 Suspected black holes
12.4 Nearest black hole candidates
12.5 Recent discoveries
13 Features and theories
13.1 Gravitational field
13.2 Event horizon
13.3 Space-time distortion and frame of reference
13.4 Inside the event horizon
13.5 Singularity
13.6 Rotating black holes
13.7 Entropy and Hawking radiation
13.8 Black hole unitarity
14 Mathematical theory
15 Alternative models
16 Black holes and Earth
17 See also
18 Notes
19 References
19.1 Popular reading
19.2 University textbooks and monographs
19.3 Research papers
20 External links



[edit] Sizes of black holes
Black holes can be divided into 4 size categories:

Supermassive black holes containing millions to billions of solar masses are believed to exist in the center of most galaxies, including our own Milky Way. They could have been formed in one or more of the following ways: via gravitational collapse of a dense cluster of stars; by large amounts of mass accreting onto a smaller "seed" black hole; by repeated fusion of smaller black holes.
Note: 1 solar mass = the mass of our sun.
Intermediate-mass black holes, whose size is measured in thousands of solar masses. Intermediate-mass black holes have been proposed as a possible power source for ultra-luminous X ray sources.
Stellar-mass black holes have masses ranging from 1.44 to 15 solar masses. This is narrower than the range of masses found in "normal" stars because of the way in which black holes are formed - most stars are too small to form black holes at the end of their "normal" lives and and the smallest star which is large enough will form a black hole of 1.44 solar masses (the Chandrasekhar limit).
Small black holes which are smaller than stellar-mass black holes but larger than micro black holes.
Micro black holes, which have masses smaller than that of a hydrogen atom and such small radii that their behavior and internal structure are determined as much by quantum mechanics as by general relativity. So they could be significantly different from larger black holes, but present-day physics is not advanced enough to predict their properties and behavior.
Astrophysicists expect to find stellar-mass and larger black holes, because a stellar mass black hole is formed by the gravitational collapse of a star of 3 or more solar masses at the end of its "normal" lifetime (the collapse causes a supernova), and can then act as a "seed" for the formation of a much larger black hole.

Smaller black holes may theoretically be produced by:

The Big Bang, which produced pressures far larger than that of a supernova and therefore sufficient to produce primordial black holes without needing the powerful gravity fields of collapsing large stars.
The "evaporation" of larger black holes.
Particle accelerators several orders of magnitude more powerful than we can build at present.

[edit] What makes it impossible to escape from black holes?
General relativity says that mass bends space-time, and gravity is one manifestation of this. A black hole contains enough mass, compressed into an abnormally small volume, to bend space-time so much that, at all points within a certain distance of the center (within the event horizon, see below) all directions lead to the center - even if you try to move backwards. This is why even the most powerful spaceship cannot escape from a black hole if it goes too close.

The term "space-time" refers to the fact that, in general relativity (and in special relativity) space and time are not independent of each other. The best known example of this is time dilation, in other words if a spaceship passes by at close to the the speed of light then it will appear to a "stationary" observer that clocks on the ship are running slow and any organisms aboard the ship are aging more slowly than normal.

It's easier to explain "bending space-time" in non-mathematical terms if we consider only space. Suppose there was a race of intelligent organisms who perceive only 2 dimensions of space, for example length and width but not height, and live on a large sheet which has no thickness. If a 3-dimensional experimenter could bend the sheet into a sphere, the 2-dimensional people would find that if they travel for long enough in the same direction they always return to their starting point, no matter which way they go.

In this simple example the 2-dimensional people could change direction while they are traveling, or even stop. But when physicists use the equations of general relativity to calculate what happens in a black hole, they find that trying to stop or change direction does not prevent a spaceship which has got too close to the black hole from falling into the center - the black hole's concentrated mass bends space-time so thoroughly that space and time swap roles and space flows in only one direction, towards the center.

Ted Bunn's Black Holes FAQ explains in simple language some other consequences of the way in which black holes bend space-time.


[edit] Do black holes have "no hair"?
The "No hair" theorem states that black holes have only 3 internal properties: mass, angular momentum and electric charge (of course they also have position and velocity, which can only be measured relative to other objects). So, for example, a black hole has no color or temperature, and it is impossible to tell the difference between a black hole formed from a highly compressed mass of normal matter and one formed from a highly compressed mass of anti-matter.

The theorem only works in some of the types of universe which the equations of general relativity allow, but until the the late 1990s it appeared that the universe in which we live belongs to one of the types in which the theorem works. However astronomical observations from 1999 onwards suggest that the expansion of the universe is accelerating. One of the most widely-supported explanations for the acceleration is that the cosmological constant in Einstein's general relativity equations is not zero, and the "no hair" theorem does not work if the cosmological constant is not zero.


[edit] Types of black hole
Despite the uncertainty about whether the "No hair" theorem applies to our universe, astrophysicists currently classify black holes according to their angular momentum (non-zero angular momentum means the black hole is rotating) and electric charge:

Non-rotating Rotating
Uncharged Schwarzschild Kerr
Charged Reissner-Nordström Kerr-Newman

(All black holes have non-zero mass, so mass cannot be used for this type of "yes / "no" classification)

Physicists do not expect that black holes with a significant electric charge will be formed in nature, because the electromagnetic repulsion which resists the compression of an electrically charged mass is about 40 orders of magnitude greater (about 1040 times greater) than the gravitational attraction which compresses the mass. So this article does not cover charged black holes in detail, but the Reissner-Nordström black hole and Kerr-Newman metric articles provide more information.

On the other hand astrophysicists expect that almost all black holes will rotate, because the stars from which they are formed rotate. In fact most black holes are expected to spin very rapidly, because they retain most of the angular momentum of the stars from which they were formed but concentrated into a much smaller radius. The same laws of angular momentum make skaters spin faster if they pull their arms closer to their bodies.

This article describes non-rotating, uncharged black holes first, because they are the simplest type.


[edit] Major features of non-rotating, uncharged black holes

[edit] Event horizon
This is the boundary of the region from which not even light can escape. An observer at a safe distance would see a dull black sphere if the black hole was in a pure vacuum but in front of a light blackground such as a bright nebula. The event horizon is not a solid surface, and does not obstruct or slow down matter or radiation which is traveling towards the region within the event horizon.

The event horizon is the defining feature of a black hole - it is black because no light or other radiation can escape from inside it. So the event horizon hides whatever happens inside it and we can only calculate what happens by using the best theory available, which at present is general relativity. The event horizon is not something which has been directly observered, only inferred by using some form of the cosmic censorship hypothesis.

The gravitational field outside the event horizon is identical to the field produced by any other spherically symmetric object ("perfect ball") of the same mass. The popular conception of black holes as "sucking" things in is false: objects can orbit around black holes indefinitely without getting any closer.


[edit] Singularity at a single point
A mathematical singularity is a situation in which a set of equations goes badly wrong.

According to general relativity, a black hole's mass is entirely compressed into a region with zero volume, which means its density and gravitational pull are infinite, and so is the curvature of space-time which it causes. These infinite values cause most physical equations, including those of general relativity, to stop working at the center of a black hole. So physicists call the zero-volume, infinitely dense region at the center of a black hole a "singularity".

The singularity in a non-rotating, uncharged black hole is a point, in other words it has zero length, width and height.

But there is an important uncertainty about this description: quantum mechanics is as well-supported by mathematics and experimental evidence as general relativity, and does not allow objects to have zero size - so it says the center of a black hole is not a singularity but just a very large mass compressed into the smallest possible volume. At present we have no well-established theory which combines quantum mechanics and general relativity; and the most promising candidate, string theory, also does not allow objects to have zero size.

The rest of this article will follow the predictions of general relativity, because quantum mechanics deals with very small-scale (sub-atomic) phenomena and general relativity is the best theory we have at present for explaining large-scale phenomena such as the behavior of masses similar to or larger than stars.


[edit] A photon sphere
A photon sphere is a spherical region of space such that photons approaching along tangents to the sphere will become trapped in an unstable orbit. For non-rotating black holes, the photon sphere has a radius 1.5 times larger than the radius of the event horizon. No orbit with a semi-major axis less than this distance is possible, but within the photon sphere constant acceleration will allow a spacecraft or probe to hover above the event horizon.

Other extremely compact objects such as neutron stars can also have photon spheres. This follows from the fact that light "captured" by a photon sphere does not pass within the radius that would form the event horizon if the object were a black hole of the same mass, and therefore its behavior does not depend on the presence of an event horizon.


[edit] Accretion disk
Space is not a pure vacuum - even interstellar space contains a few atoms of hydrogen per cubic centimeter. The powerful gravity field of a black hole pulls this towards and then into the black hole. The gas nearest the event horizon forms a disk and, at this short range, the black hole's gravity is strong enough to compress the gas to a relatively high density. The pressure, friction and other mechanisms within the disk generate enormous energy - in fact they convert matter to energy more efficiently than the nuclear fusion processes that power stars. As a result, the disk glows very brightly, although disks round black holes radiate mainly X-rays rather than visible light.

Accretion disks are not proof of the presence of black holes, because other massive, ultra-dense objects such as neutron stars and white dwarfs cause accretion disks to form and to behave in the same ways as those round black holes.


[edit] Major features of rotating black holes
Main article: Rotating black hole

Two important surfaces around a rotating black hole. The inner sphere is the static limit (the event horizon). It is the inner boundary of a region called the ergosphere. The oval-shaped surface, touching the event horizon at the poles, is the outer boundary of the ergosphere. Within the ergosphere a particle is forced (dragging of space and time) to rotate and may gain energy at the cost of the rotational energy of the black hole (Penrose process).Rotating black holes share many of the features of non-rotating black holes - inability of light or anything else to escape from within their event horizons, accretion disks, etc. But general relativity predicts that rapid rotation of a large mass produces further distortions of space-time in addition to those which a non-rotating large mass produces, and these additional effects make rotating black holes strikingly different from non-rotating ones.


[edit] Two event horizons
If two rotating black holes have the same mass but different rotation speeds, the inner event horizon of the faster-spinning black hole will have a larger radius and its outer event horizon will have a smaller radius than in the slower-spinning black hole. In the most extreme case the 2 event horizons have zero radius, the region hidden by them has zero size and therefore the object is not a black hole but a naked singularity. Many physicists think that some principle which has not yet been discovered prevents the existence of a naked singularity and therefore prevents a black hole from spinning fast enough to create one.


[edit] Two photon spheres
General relativity predicts that a rotating black hole has two photon spheres, one for each event horizon. A beam of light traveling in a direction opposite to the spin of the black hole will circularly orbit the hole at the outer photon sphere. A beam of light traveling in the same direction as the black hole's spin will circularly orbit at the inner photon sphere.


[edit] Ergosphere
A large, ultra-dense rotating mass creates an effect called frame-dragging, so that space-time is dragged round it in the direction of the rotation. If you find that hard to imagine, think of a large fairground roundabout (but not a waltzer!) - from the point of view of a rider all the other riders appear to stay in the same places, but from a spectator's point of view all the riders are whirling round.

Rotating black holes have an ergosphere, a region bounded by:

on the outside, an oblate spheroid which coincides with the event horizon at the poles and is noticeably wider round the "equator". This boundary is sometimes called the "ergosurface", but it is just a boundary and has no more solidity than the event horizon. At points exactly on the ergosurface, space-time is dragged round at the speed of light.
on the inside, the outer event horizon.
Within the ergosphere space-time is dragged round faster than light - general relativity forbids material objects to travel faster than light (so does special relativity), but allows regions of space-time to move faster than light relative to other regions of space-time.

Objects and radiation (including light) can stay in orbit within the ergosphere without falling to the center. But they cannot hover (remain stationary as seen by an external observer) because that would require them to move backwards faster than light relative to their own regions of space-time, which are moving faster than light relative to an external observer.

Objects and radiation can also escape from the ergosphere. In fact the Penrose process predicts that objects will sometimes fly out of the ergosphere, obtaining the energy for this by "stealing" some of the black hole's rotational energy. If a large total mass of objects escapes in this way the black hole will spin more slowly and may even stop spinning eventually.


[edit] Ring-shaped singularity
General relativity predicts that a rotating black hole will have a ring singularity which lies in the plane of the "equator" and has zero width and thickness - but remember that quantum mechanics does not allow objects to have zero size in any dimension, so general relativity's prediction is only the best idea we until someone devises a theory which combines general relativity and quantum mechanics.


[edit] Possibility of escaping from a rotating black hole
Kerr's solution for the equations of general relativity predicts that:

The properties of space-time between the two event horizons allow objects to move only towards the singularity.
But the properties of space-time within the inner event horizon allow objects to move away from the singularity, pass through another set of inner and outer event horizons, and emerge out of the black hole into another universe or another part of this universe without traveling faster than the speed of light.
If this is true, rotating black holes could theoretically provide the wormholes which often appear in science fiction. Unfortunately, it is unlikely that the internal properties of a rotating black hole are exactly as described by Kerr's solution[2] and it is not currently known whether the actual properties of a rotating black hole would provide a similar escape route for an object via the inner event horizon.

Even if this escape route is possible, it is unlikely to be useful because a spacecraft which followed that path would probably be distorted beyond recognition by spaghettification.


[edit] What happens when something falls into a black hole
This section describes what when something falls into a non-rotating, uncharged black hole. The effects of rotating and charged black holes are more complicated but the final result is much the same - the falling object is absorbed (unless rotating black holes really can act as wormholes).


[edit] Spaghettification
An object in any very strong gravity field is spaghettified (stretched like spaghetti), because:

The inverse square law means that there is a stronger gravitational pull on the side of the object nearest the source of the gravity field than on the far side.
In an extremely strong gravity field, the difference in pull is great enough to stretch the object.
An object does not need be falling to be spaghettified - it can happen to objects which are orbiting in or even moving out of a very strong gravity field. But spaghettification becomes increasingly intense for falling objects because: the gravity field is stronger closer to its source; the distance between the object's leading and trailing sides is a larger fraction of the total distance from the object to the gravity source.

Strictly speaking an object should only be spaghettified if it is not tumbling. If it's tumbling, the result should be more like what happens when pizza dough is being made.

A relatively low-mass black hole will start to spaghettify a falling object before the object reaches the event horizon, while a super-massive black hole will not cause noticeable spaghettification until after the object crosses the event horizon. That's one of several surprises that the inverse square law produces when you apply it to black holes (another is that, if you define a black hole's density as its mass divided by the volume of the region inside the event horizon, low-mass black holes are denser than high-mass ones).


[edit] Before the falling object crosses the event horizon
An object in a gravitational field experiences a slowing down of time, called time dilation, relative to an observers outside the field - the observer will see that physical processes in the object, including clocks, appear to run slowly. Near the event horizon, the time dilation increases rapidly.

From the viewpoint of a distant observer, an object falling into a black hole appears to slow down, approaching but never quite reaching the event horizon: and it appears to become redder and dimmer, because of the extreme gravitational red shift caused by the gravity of the black hole. Eventually, the falling object becomes so dim that it can no longer be seen, at a point just before it reaches the event horizon. All of this is a consequence of time dilation: the object's movement is one of the processes that appear to run slower and slower, and the time dilation effect is more significant than the acceleration due to gravity; the frequency of light from the object appears to decrease, making it look redder, because the light appears to complete fewer cycles per "tick" of the observer's clock; lower-frequency light has less energy and therefore appears dimmer.

From the viewpoint of the falling object, distant objects may appear either blue-shifted or red-shifted, depending on the falling object's trajectory. Light is blue-shifted by the gravity of the black hole, but is red-shifted by the velocity of the falling object.


[edit] As the object passes through the event horizon
From the viewpoint of the falling object, nothing particularly special happens at the event horizon (apart from spaghettification, if the black hole has relatively low mass).

The curious thing is that, due to time dilation, an outside observer will never see an object cross this line - the object will instead fade from view as the frequency and photon emission rates are reduced. The net effect is that we can see nothing that occurs within the horizon, as all the light is caught in the gravity well.


[edit] Inside the event horizon
The object reaches the singularity at the center within a finite amount of proper time, as measured by a watch fixed to the falling object.

An observer on the falling object would continue to see objects outside the event horizon, blue-shifted or red-shifted depending on the falling object's trajectory (assuming that the observer survived spaghettification long enough to see anything). But the observer would not see anything closer than himself / herself / itself to the singularity, because the singularity bends space-time so that light cannot escape from it. For example if the observer fell feet-first, his / her / its feet would be invisible.


[edit] Hitting the singularity
By this time any falling observer is dead or has ceased to work (if it's a machine) because of spaghettification.

In fact spaghettification increases in power at an incredible rate as the falling object approaches the singularity, so that:

The object is torn into its component atoms.
Then the electrons are stripped from the atoms.
Then the nuclei are ripped apart, into protons and neutrons.
Then the protons and neutrons are torn apart into quarks.
Then ... we don't know what happens next (immediately before contact with the singularity), because electrons and quarks are the most fundamental particles known to physics at present. And these particles and whatever they might become next are so small that quantum mechanics governs their behavior as much as general relativity, but physicists have not yet found a theory which combines quantum mechanics and general relativity.
Finally there is nothing left of the falling object, and the black hole has slightly greater mass.

[edit] Formation and evaporation

[edit] Formation of stellar-mass black holes
Stellar-mass black holes are formed in two ways:

As a direct result of the gravitational collapse of a star.
By collisions between neutron stars[3]. Although neutron stars are fairly common, collisions appear to be very rare. Neutron stars are also formed by gravitational collapse, which is therefore ultimately responsible for all stellar-mass black holes.
Stars undergo gravitational collapse when they can no longer resist the pressure of their own gravity. This usually occurs either because a star has too little "fuel" left to maintain its temperature, or because a star which would have been stable receives a lot of extra matter in a way which does not raise its core temperature. In either case the star's temperature is no longer high enough to prevent it from collapsing under its own weight (Charles's law explains the connection between temperature and volume).

The collapse transforms the matter in the star's core into a denser state which forms one of the types of compact star. Which type of compact star is formed depends on the mass of the remnant, i.e. of the matter left to be compressed after the supernova (if one happened - see below) triggered by the collapse has blown away the outer layers.

Only the largest remnants, those exceeding 5 solar masses, generate enough pressure to produce black holes, because singularities are the most radically transformed state of matter known to physics (if you can still call it matter) and the force which resists this level of compression, neutron degeneracy pressure, is extremely strong. Remnants exceeding 5 solar masses are produced by stars which were over 20 solar masses before the collapse (the rest of the mass is usually blown into space by the supernova triggered by the collapse).

In stars which are too large to form white dwarfs, the collapse releases energy which usually produces a supernova, blowing the star's outer layers into space so that they form a spectacular nebula. But the supernova is a side-effect and does not directly contribute to producing a compact star. For example a few gamma ray bursts were expected to be followed by evidence of supernovae but this evidence did not appear[4] [5] , and one explanation is that some very large stars can form black holes fast enough to swallow the whole star before the supernova blast can reach the surface.


[edit] Formation of larger black holes
There are two main ways in which black holes of larger than stellar mass can be formed:

Stellar-mass black holes may act as "seeds" which grow by absorbing mass from interstellar gas and dust, stars and planets or smaller black holes.
Star clusters of large total mass may be merged into single bodies by their members' gravitational attraction. This will usually produce a supergiant or hypergiant star which runs short of "fuel" in a few million years and then undergoes gravitational collapse, produces a supernova or hypernova and spends the rest of its existence as a black hole.

[edit] Formation of smaller black holes
New black holes of less than stellar mass cannot be formed naturally in to-day's universe because the smallest mass which can collapse to form a black hole produces a stellar mass black hole of 1.44 solar masses.

But there are still a few ways in which smaller black holes might be formed:

By evaporation of larger black holes.
By the Big Bang, which produced sufficient pressure to form smaller black holes without the need for anything resembling a star. These primordial black holes are at present just a hypothesis.
By very powerful particle accelerators. According to the most widely-accepted theories, we would need particle accelerators several orders of magnitude more powerful than we can build at present in order to produce even a micro black hole.
But some models of the unification of the four fundamental forces do allow the formation of micro black holes under laboratory conditions. These models postulate that the energy at which gravity is unified with the other forces is comparable to the energy at which the other three are unified, as opposed to being the Planck energy (which is much higher). This would allow production of extremely short-lived black holes in terrestrial particle accelerators. No conclusive evidence of this type of black hole production has been presented.

[edit] Evaporation
Hawking radiation is a theoretical process by which black holes can evaporate into nothing. As there is no experimental evidence to corroborate it and there are still some major questions about the theoretical basis of the process, there is still debate about whether Hawking radiation can make black holes evaporate.

Quantum mechanics says that even the purest vacuum is not completely empty but is instead a "sea" of energy which has wave-like flutuations. We cannot observe this "sea" of energy directly because there is no lower energy level with which we can compare it. The fluctuations in this sea produce pairs of particles in which one is made of normal matter and the other is the corresponding antiparticle (special relativity proves mass-energy equivalence, i.e. that mass can be converted into energy and vice versa). Normally each would soon meet another instance of its antiparticle and the two would be totally converted into energy, restoring the overall matter-energy balance as it was before the pair of particles was created. The Hawking radiation theory suggests that, if such a pair of particles is created just outside the event horizon of a black hole, one of the two particles may fall into the black hole while the other escapes, because the two particles move in slightly different directions after their creation. From the point of view of an outside observer, the the black hole has just emitted a particle and therefore the black hole has lost a minute amount of its mass.

If the Hawking radiation theory is correct, only the very smallest black holes are likely to evaporate in this way. For example a black hole with the mass of our Moon would gain as much energy (and therefore mass - mass-energy equivalence again) from cosmic microwave background radiation as it emits by Hawking radiation, and larger black holes will gain more energy (and mass) than they emit. To put this in perspective, the smallest black hole which can be created naturally at present is about 5 times the mass of our sun, so most black holes have much greater mass than our Moon.


[edit] Evidence of black holes

[edit] Accretion disks and gas jets

Formation of extragalactic jets from a black hole's accretion diskMost accretion disks and gas jets are not clear proof that a stellar-mass black hole is present, because other massive, ultra-dense objects such as neutron stars and white dwarfs cause accretion disks and gas jets to form and to behave in the same ways as those round black holes. But they can often help by telling astronomers where it might be worth looking for a black hole.

On the other hand, extremely large accretion disks and gas jets may be good evidence for the presence of supermassive black holes, because as far as we know any mass large enough to power these phenomena must be a black hole.


[edit] Strong radiation emissions
Steady X-ray and gamma ray emissions also do not prove that a black hole is present but can tell astronomers where it might be worth looking for one - and they have the advantage that they pass fairly easily through nebulae and gas clouds.

But strong, irregular emissions of X-rays, gamma rays and other electromagnetic radiation can help to prove that a massive, ultra-dense object is not a black hole, so that "black hole hunters" can move on to some other object. Neutron stars and other very dense stars have surfaces, and matter colliding with the surface at a high percentage of the speed of light will produce intense flares of radiation at irregular intervals. Black holes have no material surface, so the absence of irregular flares round a massive, ultra-dense object suggests that there is a good chance of finding a black hole there.

Intense but one-time gamma ray bursts (GRBs) may signal the birth of "new" black holes, because astrophysicists think that GRBs are caused either by the gravitational collapse of giant stars[6] or by collisions between neutron stars[7], and both types of event involve sufficient mass and pressure to produce black holes. But it appears that a collision between a neutron star and a black hole can also cause a GRB [8], so a GRB is not proof that a "new" black hole has been formed. All known GRBs come from outside our own galaxy, and most come from billions of light years away[9] so the black holes associated with them are actually billions of years old.

Some astrophysicists believe that some ultraluminous X-ray sources may the accretion disks of intermediate-mass black holes [10].

Quasars are thought to be caused by the accretion disks of supermassive black holes, since we know of nothing else which is powerful enough to produce such strong emissions. While X-rays and gamma rays have much higher frequencies and shorter wavelengths than visible light, quasars radiate mainly radio waves, which have higher frequencies and shorter wavelengths than visible light.


[edit] Gravitational lensing

Gravitational distortions caused by a black hole in front of the Large Magellanic Cloud (artistic interpretation)Gravitational lensing is another phenomenon which can have other causes besides the presence of a black hole, because any very strong gravitational field bends light rays. The most spectacular examples produce multiple images of very distant objects by bending towards our telescopes light rays which would otherwise have gone in different directions. But these lensing effects are probably produced by distant galaxies.


[edit] Objects orbiting possible black holes
Some large celestial objects are almost certainly orbiting round black holes, and the principles behind this conclusion are surprisingly simple if we consider a circular orbit first (although all known astronomical orbits are elliptical):

The radius of the central object round which the observed object is orbiting must be less than the radius of the orbit, otherwise the two objects would collide.
The orbital period and the radius of the orbit make it easy to calculate the centrifugal force created by the orbiting object. Strictly speaking the centrifugal force also depends on the orbiting object's mass, but the next two steps show why we can get away with pretending this is a fixed number, e.g. 1.
The gravitational attraction between the central object and the orbiting object must be exactly equal to the centrifugal force, otherwise the orbiting body would either spiral into the central object or drift away.
The required gravitational attraction depends on the mass of the central object, the mass of the orbiting object and the radius of the orbit. But we can simplify the calculation of both the centrifugal force and the gravitational attraction by pretending that the mass of the orbiting object is the same fixed number, e.g. 1. This makes it very easy to calculate the mass of the central object.
If the Schwarzschild radius for a body with the mass of the central object is greater than the maximum radius of the central object, the central object must be a black hole whose event horizon's radius is equal to the Schwarzschild radius.
Unfortunately in real astronomy there are some complications, but astronomers have been dealing with them for centuries (since the time of Kepler):

Astronomical orbits are elliptical. This complicates the calculation of the centrifugal force, the gravitational attraction and the maximum radius of the central body. But Kepler could handle this without needing a computer.
The orbital periods in this type of situation are several years, so several years' worth of observations are needed to determine the actual orbit accurately. The "possibly a black hole" and "probably not a black hole" indicators (accretion disks, gas jets, radiation emissions, etc.) help "black hole hunters" to decide which orbits are worth observing for such long periods.
If there are other large bodies within a few light years, their gravity fields will perturb the orbit. Adjusting the calculations to filter out the effects of perturbation can be difficult, but astronomers are used to doing it.

[edit] Inside the event horizon
Space-time inside the event horizon of an uncharged non-rotating black hole is peculiar in that the singularity is in every observer's future, so all particles within the event horizon move inexorably towards it (Penrose and Hawking). This means that there is a conceptual inaccuracy in the non-relativistic concept of a black hole as originally proposed by John Michell in 1783. In Michell's theory, the escape velocity at the surface of the star is greater than the speed of light, but it would still be theoretically possible to hoist an object out of a black hole using a rope. General relativity eliminates such loopholes, because once an object is inside the event horizon, its time-line contains an end-point to time itself, and no possible world line comes back out through the event horizon. Once inside the black hole, at most one course-correction (performed immediately) is appropriate to maximize your survival time.

As the object continues to approach the singularity, it will be stretched radially with respect to the black hole and compressed in directions perpendicular to this axis. This phenomenon, called spaghettification, occurs as a result of tidal forces: the parts of the object closer to the singularity feel a stronger pull towards it (causing stretching along the axis), and all parts are pulled in the direction of the singularity, which is only aligned with the object's average motion along the axis of the object (causing compression towards the axis).




A black hole is an object predicted by general relativity,[11] with a gravitational field so powerful that even electromagnetic radiation (such as light) cannot escape its pull.[1] A black hole is defined to be a region of space-time where escape to the outside universe is impossible. The outer boundary of this region is called the event horizon. Nothing can move from inside the event horizon to the outside, even briefly, due to the extreme gravitational field existing within the region. For the same reason, observers outside the event horizon cannot see any events which may be happening within the event horizon; thus any energy being radiated or events happening within the region are forever unable to be seen or detected from outside. Within the black hole is a singularity, an anomalous place where matter is compressed to the degree that the known laws of physics no longer apply to it.

Theoretically, a black hole can be of any size. Astrophysicists expect to find black holes with masses ranging between roughly the mass of the Sun ("stellar-mass" black holes) to many millions of times the mass of the Sun (supermassive black holes).

The existence of black holes in the universe is well supported by astronomical observation, particularly from studying X-ray emission from X-ray binaries and active galactic nuclei. It has also been hypothesized that black holes radiate an undetectably small amount of energy due to quantum mechanical effects. This is called Hawking radiation.


[edit] Simple overview

Gravitational distortions caused by a black hole in front of the Large Magellanic Cloud (artistic interpretation)Most planets and other celestial bodies are stable because the Pauli force between electrons prevents atoms from collapsing into each other, while gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong force pull them together. These opposing forces create a balance which allows material bodies to retain their shape and structure. In extreme circumstances, however, if there is enough matter in a small enough space, gravity ends up winning, and the matter collapses: electrons cannot stay distant from the atomic nucleus, and incredibly dense matter forms (sometimes called neutronium).

If an even greater amount of mass is contained within the same space, even the Pauli force between nucleons cannot resist gravity and the body collapses into itself forming a black hole. In a way that can be hard to imagine, nothing can stop this collapse if enough matter gets into a small enough space, and the matter collapses to a point of zero height, width, and depth, known as a singularity. The mass in a singularity is so dense it is no longer "matter" in any real sense, but some kind of anomaly in space. Anything that gets too close to this singularity will also collapse into it the same way, whether it is matter, energy or even light itself, which is the fastest thing in the universe. The failure of even light to escape its gravitation is how this phenomenon initially acquired the name black hole.

Because matter and energy that pass this "boundary" can never escape back again, observers outside this invisible "boundary" can neither see inside nor detect what might happen within the interior — it is forever hidden from view. The invisible 'dividing line' in space where matter or energy will be unavoidably drawn into the black hole is known as the event horizon, because, like the earth's horizon, nothing can be seen beyond it.

It was later found that energy can escape from black holes in an unexpected way, and that therefore black holes can evaporate. In space, virtual particles are continually coming into existence and vanishing on a microscopic scale that is so small they cannot easily be detected. This is a consequence of quantum physics and only works on a subatomic scale. Conceptually, these particles can be imagined to appear in pairs and vanish a tiny fraction of a second later again. For this reason they are not readily noticed. But close to the black hole's event horizon, the intense gravitational field separates the two particles even in the fractional second that they exist. One particle may be absorbed into the black hole, the other escapes. From an external perspective all that is seen is the second of these, giving the appearance of energy being radiated outward, escaping from its gravitational field beyond the event horizon. In this way, paradoxically, black holes can evaporate. This process is thought to be significant for the very smallest black holes, as a black hole of stellar mass or larger would absorb more energy from cosmic microwave background radiation than they lose this way. The radiation emitted is referred to as Hawking radiation.

Black holes generally come in two types: those with a mass up to ten times the mass of our Sun, and those with a mass that is millions or billions of times that of our sun. The latter are called supermassive black holes, and are thought to exist at the centers of galaxies.[12] Micro black holes are believed to be possible but very short-lived, capable of creation under extreme circumstances such as the Big Bang or perhaps by very high powered particle accelerators or ultra-high-energy cosmic rays.[13]


[edit] History
The concept of a body so massive that even light could not escape was put forward by the geologist John Michell in a 1784 paper sent to Henry Cavendish and published by the Royal Society.[14] At that time, the Newtonian theory of gravity and the concept of escape velocity were well known. Michell computed that a body with 500 times the radius of the Sun and of the same density would have, at its surface, an escape velocity exceeding that of the speed of light, and therefore would be invisible. In his words:

“ If the semi-diameter of a sphere of the same density as the Sun were to exceed that of the Sun in the proportion of 500 to 1, a body falling from an infinite height towards it would have acquired at its surface greater velocity than that of light, and consequently supposing light to be attracted by the same force in proportion to its vis inertiae (inertial mass), with other bodies, all light emitted from such a body would be made to return towards it by its own proper gravity. ”

Michell considered the possibility that many such objects that cannot be seen might be present in the cosmos.

In 1796, the mathematician Pierre-Simon Laplace promoted the same idea in the first and second editions of his book Exposition du système du Monde (it was removed from later editions). The idea gained little attention in the nineteenth century, since light was thought to be a massless wave, hence not influenced by gravity.

In 1915, Albert Einstein developed the theory of gravity called general relativity, having earlier shown that gravity does influence light. A few months later, Karl Schwarzschild gave the solution for the gravitational field of a point mass and a spherical mass,[15][16] showing that a black hole could theoretically exist. The Schwarzschild radius is now known to be the radius of the event horizon of a non-rotating black hole, but this was not well understood at that time. Schwarzschild himself thought it was not physical. A few months after Schwarzschild, a student of Lorentz, Johannes Droste, independently gave the same solution for the point mass and wrote more extensively about its properties.

In 1930, the astrophysicist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar argued that special relativity demonstrated that a non-radiating body above 1.44 solar masses, now known as the Chandrasekhar limit, would collapse since there was nothing known at that time that could stop it from doing so. His arguments were opposed by Arthur Eddington, who believed that something would inevitably stop the collapse. Both were correct, since a white dwarf more massive than the Chandrasekhar limit will collapse into a neutron star. However, a neutron star above about three solar masses (the Tolman-Oppenheimer-Volkoff limit) will itself become unstable against collapse due to similar physics.

In 1939, Robert Oppenheimer and H. Snyder predicted that massive stars could undergo a dramatic gravitational collapse. Black holes could, in principle, be formed in nature. Such objects for a while were called frozen stars since the collapse would be observed to rapidly slow down and become heavily redshifted near the Schwarzschild radius. The mathematics showed that an outside observer would see the surface of the star frozen in time at the instant where it crosses that radius. These hypothetical objects were not the topic of much interest until the late 1960s. Most physicists believed that they were a peculiar feature of the highly symmetric solution found by Schwarzschild, and that objects collapsing in nature would not form black holes.

Interest in black holes was rekindled in 1967 because of theoretical and experimental progress. In 1970, Stephen Hawking and Roger Penrose proved that black holes are a generic feature in Einstein's theory of gravity, and cannot be avoided in some collapsing objects.[11] Interest was renewed in the astronomical community with the discovery of pulsars. Shortly thereafter, the expression "black hole" was coined by theoretical physicist John Wheeler,[17] being first used in his public lecture Our Universe: the Known and Unknown on 29 December 1967. The older Newtonian objects of Michell and Laplace are often referred to as "dark stars" to distinguish them from the "black holes" of general relativity.


[edit] Evidence

A (simulated) black hole of ten solar masses as seen from a distance of 600 km with the Milky Way in the background (horizontal camera opening angle: 90°). The blurred ring is due to objects whose light must travel close enough to the black hole to suffer gravitational lensing distortion before being observed.
[edit] Formation and size
General relativity (as well as most other metric theories of gravity) not only says that black holes can exist, but in fact predicts that they will be formed in nature whenever a sufficient amount of mass gets packed in a given region of space, through a process called gravitational collapse; as the mass inside the given region of space increases, its gravity becomes stronger and (in the language of relativity) increasingly deforms the space around it, until ultimately nothing (not even light) can escape the gravity; at this point an event horizon is formed, and matter and energy must inevitably collapse to a density beyond the limits of known physics. For example, if the Sun was compressed to a radius of roughly three kilometers (about 1/232,000 its present radius or 1/1.2487×1016 of its initial volume), the resulting gravitational field would create an event horizon around it, and thus a black hole.

A quantitative analysis of this idea led to the prediction that a stellar remnant above about three to five times the mass of the Sun (the Tolman-Oppenheimer-Volkoff limit) would be unable to support itself as a neutron star via degeneracy pressure, and would inevitably collapse into a black hole. Stellar remnants with this mass are expected to be produced immediately at the end of the lives of stars that are more than 25 to 50 times the mass of the Sun, or by accretion of matter onto an existing neutron star.

Stellar collapse will generate black holes containing at least three solar masses. Black holes smaller than this limit can only be created if their matter is subjected to sufficient pressure from some source other than self-gravitation. The enormous pressures needed for this are thought to have existed in the very early stages of the universe, possibly creating primordial black holes which could have masses smaller than that of the Sun.

Supermassive black holes are believed to exist in the center of most galaxies, including our own Milky Way. This type of black hole contains millions to billions of solar masses, and there are several models of how they might have been formed. The first is via gravitational collapse of a dense cluster of stars. A second is by large amounts of mass accreting onto a "seed" black hole of stellar mass. A third is by repeated fusion of smaller black holes. Effects of such supermassive black holes on spacetime may be observed in regions as the Virgo Cluster of galaxies, for example, the location of M87 (see image below) and its neighbors.

Intermediate-mass black holes have a mass between that of stellar and supermassive black holes, typically in the range of thousands of solar masses. Intermediate-mass black holes have been proposed as a possible power source for ultra-luminous X ray sources, and in 2004 detection was claimed of an intermediate-mass black hole orbiting the Sagittarius A* supermassive black hole candidate at the core of the Milky Way galaxy. This detection is disputed.

The lower limit on the mass of a black hole comes from the quantum arguments. According to the most commonly accepted physics, one should not expect to observe black holes lighter than the Planck mass, or approximately 10-5 g, and even those would only exist for minuscule periods of time before evaporating. If true, this limit would rule out the possibility of creating miniature black holes in the laboratory in the foreseeable future: even today, center-of-mass collision energies of the world's most advanced particle accelerators are still 14–15 orders of magnitude lower than the Planck mass.

However, certain models of unification of the four fundamental forces do allow the formation of micro black holes under laboratory conditions. These postulate that the energy at which gravity is unified with the other forces is comparable to the energy at which the other three are unified, as opposed to being the Planck energy (which is much higher). This would allow production of extremely short-lived black holes in terrestrial particle accelerators. No conclusive evidence of this type of black hole production has been presented, though even a negative result improves constraints on compactification of extra dimensions from string theory or other models of physics.


[edit] Observation

Formation of extragalactic jets from a black hole's accretion diskIn theory, no object within the event horizon of a black hole can ever escape, including light. However, black holes can be inductively detected from observation of phenomena near them, such as gravitational lensing, galactic jets, and stars that appear to be in orbit (typically with short orbital periods of only a few hours or days suggesting a massive partner) around a point in space where there is no visible matter.

The most conspicuous effects are believed to come from matter accreting onto a black hole, which is predicted to collect into an extremely hot and fast-spinning accretion disk. The internal viscosity of the disk causes it to become extremely hot, and emit large amounts of X-ray and ultraviolet radiation. This process is extremely efficient and can convert about 10% of the rest mass energy of an object into radiation, as opposed to nuclear fusion which can only convert a few percent of the mass to energy. Other observed effects are narrow jets of particles at relativistic speeds heading along the disk's axis.

However, accretion disks, jets, and orbiting objects are found not only around black holes, but also around other objects such as neutron stars and white dwarfs; and the dynamics of bodies near these non-black hole attractors is largely similar to that of bodies around black holes. It is currently a very complex and active field of research involving magnetic fields and plasma physics to disentangle what is going on. Hence, for the most part, observations of accretion disks and orbital motions merely indicate that there is a compact object of a certain mass, and says very little about the nature of that object. The identification of an object as a black hole requires the further assumption that no other object (or bound system of objects) could be so massive and compact. Most astrophysicists accept that this is the case, since according to general relativity, any concentration of matter of sufficient density must necessarily collapse into a black hole.

One important observable difference between black holes and other compact massive objects is that any infalling matter will eventually collide with the latter at relativistic speeds, leading to emission as the kinetic energy of the matter is thermalized. In addition thermonuclear "burning" may occur on the surface of compact massive objects as material collides or builds up. These processes produce irregular intense flares of X-rays and other hard radiation around some objects. The lack of such flare-ups around such a compact concentration of mass is taken as evidence suggesting that the object is a black hole which lacks a surface onto which matter can collect and from which radiation can be emitted.


[edit] Suspected black holes

An artist depiction of two black holes merging.There is now a great deal of indirect astronomical observational evidence for black holes in two mass ranges:

stellar mass black holes with masses of a typical star (4–15 times the mass of our Sun), and
supermassive black holes with masses ranging from on the order of 105 to 1010 solar masses.
Additionally, there is some evidence for intermediate-mass black holes (IMBHs), those with masses of a few hundred to a few thousand times that of the Sun. These black holes may be responsible for the emission from ultraluminous X-ray sources (ULXs).

Candidates for stellar-mass black holes were identified mainly by the presence of accretion disks of the right size and speed, without the irregular flare-ups that are expected from disks around other compact objects. Stellar-mass black holes may be involved in gamma ray bursts (GRBs); short duration GRBs are believed to be caused by colliding neutron stars, which form a black hole on merging. Observations of long GRBs in association with supernovae[18] suggest that long GRBs are caused by collapsars;[19] a massive star whose core collapses to form a black hole, drawing in the surrounding material. Therefore, a GRB could possibly signal the birth of a new black hole, aiding efforts to search for them.

Candidates for more massive black holes were first provided by the active galactic nuclei and quasars, discovered by radioastronomers in the 1960s. The efficient conversion of mass into energy by friction in the accretion disk of a black hole seems to be the only explanation for the copious amounts of energy generated by such objects. Indeed the introduction of this theory in the 1970s removed a major objection to the belief that quasars were distant galaxies — namely, that no physical mechanism could generate that much energy.

From observations in the 1980s of motions of stars around the galactic centre, it is now believed that such supermassive black holes exist in the centre of most galaxies, including our own Milky Way. Sagittarius A* is now generally agreed to be the location of a supermassive black hole at the centre of the Milky Way galaxy. The orbits of stars within a few AU of Sagittarius A* rule out any object other than a black hole at the centre of the Milky Way assuming the current standard laws of physics are correct.


The jet emitted by the galaxy M87 in this image is thought to be caused by a supermassive black hole at the galaxy's centreThe current picture is that all galaxies may have a supermassive black hole in their centre, and that this black hole accretes gas and dust in the middle of the galaxies generating huge amounts of radiation — until all the nearby mass has been swallowed and the process shuts off. This picture may also explain why there are no nearby quasars.

Although the details are still not clear, it seems that the growth of the black hole is intimately related to the growth of the spheroidal component — an elliptical galaxy, or the bulge of a spiral galaxy — in which it lives.

In 2002, the Hubble Telescope identified evidence indicating that intermediate size black holes exist in globular clusters named M15 and G1. The evidence for the black holes stemmed from the orbital velocity of the stars in the globular clusters; however, a group of neutron stars could cause similar observations.


[edit] Nearest black hole candidates
Apart from Sagittarius A*, the black hole in our Milky Way's center, there are several strong black hole candidates nearer than it to us, all of them X-ray binaries which draw matter from their partner via an accretion disk. They have masses from three to more than a dozen sun masses.[20][21]

Name Mass in M☉ Mass of partner (M☉) Orbital period (days) Distance from Earth (light years)
A0620-00 9−13 2.6−2.8 0.33 ~3500
GRO J1655-40 6−6.5 2,6−2,8 2.8 5000−10000
XTE J1118+480 6.4−7.2 6−6.5 0.17 6200
Cyg X-1 7−13 0.25 5.6 6000−8000
GRO J0422+32 3−5 1.1 0.21 ~8500
GS 2000+25 7−8 4.9−5.1 0.35 ~8800
V404 Cyg 10−14 6.0 6.5 ~10000
GX 339-4 5−6 1.75 ~15000
GRS 1124-683 6.5−8.2 0.43 ~17000
XTE J1550-564 10−11 6.0−7.5 1.5 ~17000
XTE J1819-254 10−18 ~3 2.8 < 25000
4U 1543-475 8−10 0.25 1.1 ~24000
1915+105 GRO . . . .
Sgr A* 3.7 million − − ~25000


[edit] Recent discoveries
In 2004, astronomers found 31 candidate supermassive black holes from searching obscured quasars. The lead scientist said that there are from two to five times as many supermassive black holes as previously predicted.[22]

In June 2004 astronomers found a super-massive black hole, Q0906+6930, at the centre of a distant galaxy about 12.7 billion light years away. This observation indicated rapid creation of super-massive black holes in the early universe.[23]

In November 2004 a team of astronomers reported the discovery of the first intermediate-mass black hole in our Galaxy, orbiting three light-years from Sagittarius A*. This medium black hole of 1,300 solar masses is within a cluster of seven stars, possibly the remnant of a massive star cluster that has been stripped down by the Galactic Centre.[24][25] This observation may add support to the idea that supermassive black holes grow by absorbing nearby smaller black holes and stars.

In February 2005, a blue giant star SDSS J090745.0+24507 was found to be leaving the Milky Way at twice the escape velocity (0.0022 of the speed of light), having been catapulted out of the galactic core which its path can be traced back to. The high velocity of this star supports the hypothesis of a super-massive black hole in the centre of the galaxy.

The formation of micro black holes on Earth in particle accelerators has been tentatively reported,[26] but not yet confirmed. So far there are no observed candidates for primordial black holes.

In January 2007, researchers at the University of Southampton in the United Kingdom reported finding a black hole inside a compact group of ancient stars known as a globular cluster. Many doubted newly-formed black holes could exist in such locations due to gravitational interactions.[27]


[edit] Features and theories
Black holes require the general relativistic concept of a curved spacetime: their most striking properties rely on a distortion of the geometry of the space surrounding them.


[edit] Gravitational field
The gravitational field outside a black hole is identical to the field produced by any other spherically symmetric object of the same mass. The popular conception of black holes as "sucking" things in is false: objects can orbit around black holes indefinitely without getting any closer. The strange properties of spacetime only become noticeable closer to the black hole.


[edit] Event horizon
The effective boundary of a black hole is known as the event horizon. The event horizon is not a physical surface; it is the invisible dividing line in space beyond which outside observers cannot see, and from within which matter and energy cannot exit. Stephen Hawking proved that the topology of the event horizon of a non-spinning black hole is a sphere. Due to the extremely strong gravitational field, anything inside the event horizon, including a photon, is prevented from escaping across the event horizon. Particles from outside this region can fall in, cross the event horizon, and will never be able to leave. In this sense, the event horizon is a little like the point of no return.

External observers cannot probe the interior of a black hole. Consequently according to (non-quantum) general relativity, black holes can be entirely characterized by these parameters: energy, linear momentum, angular momentum, electric charge, and position at a specific time. This principle is summarized by the saying, coined by John Archibald Wheeler, "black holes have no hair" meaning that there are no features that distinguish one black hole from another, other than energy, linear momentum, charge, angular momentum, and location.


[edit] Space-time distortion and frame of reference
Objects in a gravitational field experience a slowing down of time, called time dilation, relative to observers outside the field. This phenomenon has been verified experimentally in the Scout rocket experiment of 1976,[28] and is, for example, taken into account in the Global Positioning System (GPS). Near the event horizon, the time dilation increases rapidly.

From the viewpoint of a distant observer, an object falling into a black hole appears to slow down, approaching but never quite reaching the event horizon. As the object falls into the black hole, it appears redder and dimmer to the distant observer, due to the extreme gravitational red shift caused by the gravity of the black hole. Eventually, the falling object becomes so dim that it can no longer be seen, at a point just before it reaches the event horizon.

From the viewpoint of the falling object, nothing particularly special happens at the event horizon. The object crosses the event horizon and reaches the singularity at the center within a finite amount of proper time, as measured by a watch carried with the falling observer.

From the viewpoint of the falling observer, distant objects may appear either blue-shifted or red-shifted, depending on the observer's trajectory. Light is blue-shifted by the gravity of the black hole, but is red-shifted by the velocity of the falling object.


[edit] Inside the event horizon
Space-time inside the event horizon of an uncharged non-rotating black hole is peculiar in that the singularity is in every observer's future, so all particles within the event horizon move inexorably towards it (Penrose and Hawking). This means that there is a conceptual inaccuracy in the non-relativistic concept of a black hole as originally proposed by John Michell in 1783. In Michell's theory, the escape velocity at the surface of the star is greater than the speed of light, but it would still be theoretically possible to hoist an object out of a black hole using a rope. General relativity eliminates such loopholes, because once an object is inside the event horizon, its time-line contains an end-point to time itself, and no possible world line comes back out through the event horizon. Once inside the black hole, at most one course-correction (performed immediately) is appropriate to maximize your survival time.

As the object continues to approach the singularity, it will be stretched radially with respect to the black hole and compressed in directions perpendicular to this axis. This phenomenon, called spaghettification, occurs as a result of tidal forces: the parts of the object closer to the singularity feel a stronger pull towards it (causing stretching along the axis), and all parts are pulled in the direction of the singularity, which is only aligned with the object's average motion along the axis of the object (causing compression towards the axis).


[edit] Singularity
At the center of the black hole, well inside the event horizon, general relativity predicts a singularity, a place where the curvature of spacetime becomes infinite and gravitational forces become infinitely strong.

In a non-rotating black hole, the singularity is one-dimensional, extended in the time direction only. In a rotating black hole, the singularity is two-dimensional, extended in time and in longitude.

It is expected that future refinements or generalizations of general relativity (in particular quantum gravity) will change what is thought about the nature of black hole interiors. Most theorists interpret the mathematical singularity of the equations as indicating that the current theory is not complete, and that new phenomena must come into play as one approaches the singularity.[29]

The cosmic censorship hypothesis asserts that there are no naked singularities in general relativity. This hypothesis is that every singularity is hidden behind an event horizon and cannot be probed. Whether this hypothesis is true remains an active area of theoretical research.


[edit] Rotating black holes
Main article: Rotating black hole

An artist's impression of a black hole with a closely orbiting companion star that exceeds its Roche limit. In-falling matter forms an accretion disk, with some of the matter being ejected in highly energetic polar jets.According to theory, the event horizon of a black hole that is not spinning is spherical, and its singularity is expected to be a single point where the curvature becomes infinite. If the black hole carries angular momentum (inherited from a star that is spinning at the time of its collapse), it begins to drag space-time surrounding the event horizon in an effect known as frame-dragging. This spinning area surrounding the event horizon is called the ergosphere and has an ellipsoidal shape. Since the ergosphere is located outside the event horizon, objects can exist within the ergosphere without falling into the hole. However, because space-time itself is moving in the ergosphere, it is impossible for objects to remain in a fixed position. Objects grazing the ergosphere could in some circumstances be catapulted outwards at great speed, extracting energy (and angular momentum) from the hole, hence the Greek name ergosphere ("sphere of work") because it is capable of doing work.

The singularity inside a rotating black hole is expected to be a ring, rather than a point, though the interior geometry of a rotating black hole is currently not well understood. While the fate of an observer falling into a non-rotating black hole is spaghettification, the fate of an observer falling into a rotating black hole is much less clear. For instance, in the Kerr geometry, an infalling observer can potentially escape spaghettification by passing through an inner horizon. However, it is unlikely that the actual interior geometry of a rotating black hole is the Kerr geometry due to stability issues, and the ultimate fate of an observer falling into a rotating black hole is currently not known.[30]


[edit] Entropy and Hawking radiation
In 1971, Stephen Hawking showed that the total area of the event horizons of any collection of classical black holes can never decrease. This sounded remarkably similar to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, with area playing the role of entropy. Classically, one could violate the second law of thermodynamics by material entering a black hole disappearing from our universe and resulting in a decrease of the total entropy of the universe. Therefore, Jacob Bekenstein proposed that a black hole should have an entropy and that it should be proportional to its horizon area. Since black holes do not classically emit radiation, the thermodynamic viewpoint was simply an analogy. However, in 1974, Hawking applied quantum field theory to the curved spacetime around the event horizon and discovered that black holes can emit Hawking radiation, a form of thermal radiation. Using the first law of black hole mechanics, it follows that the entropy of a black hole is one quarter of the area of the horizon. This is a universal result and can be extended to apply to cosmological horizons such as in de Sitter space. It was later suggested that black holes are maximum-entropy objects, meaning that the maximum entropy of a region of space is the entropy of the largest black hole that can fit into it. This led to the holographic principle.

The Hawking radiation reflects a characteristic temperature of the black hole, which can be calculated from its entropy. This temperature in fact falls the more massive a black hole becomes: the more energy a black hole absorbs, the colder it gets. A black hole with roughly the mass of the planet Mercury would have a temperature in equilibrium with the cosmic microwave background radiation (about 2.73 K). More massive than this, a black hole will be colder than the background radiation, and it will gain energy from the background faster than it gives energy up through Hawking radiation, becoming even colder still. However, for a less massive black hole the effect implies that the mass of the black hole will slowly evaporate with time, with the black hole becoming hotter and hotter as it does so. Although these effects are negligible for black holes massive enough to have been formed astronomically, they would rapidly become significant for hypothetical smaller black holes, where quantum-mechanical effects dominate. Indeed, small black holes are predicted to undergo runaway evaporation and eventually vanish in a burst of radiation.


If ultra-high-energy collisions of particles in a particle accelerator can create microscopic black holes, it is expected that all types of particles will be emitted by black hole evaporation, providing key evidence for any grand unified theory. Above are the high energy particles produced in a gold ion collision on the RHIC.Although general relativity can be used to perform a semi-classical calculation of black hole entropy, this situation is theoretically unsatisfying. In statistical mechanics, entropy is understood as counting the number of microscopic configurations of a system which have the same macroscopic qualities(such as mass, charge, pressure, etc.). But without a satisfactory theory of quantum gravity, one cannot perform such a computation for black holes. Some promise has been shown by string theory, however. There one posits that the microscopic degrees of freedom of the black hole are D-branes. By counting the states of D-branes with given charges and energy, the entropy for certain supersymmetric black holes has been reproduced. Extending the region of validity of these calculations is an ongoing area of research.


[edit] Black hole unitarity
An open question in fundamental physics is the so-called information loss paradox, or black hole unitarity paradox. Classically, the laws of physics are the same run forward or in reverse. That is, if the position and velocity of every particle in the universe were measured, we could (disregarding chaos) work backwards to discover the history of the universe arbitrarily far in the past. In quantum mechanics, this corresponds to a vital property called unitarity which has to do with the conservation of probability.

Black holes, however, might violate this rule. The position under classical general relativity is subtle but straightforward: because of the classical no hair theorem, we can never determine what went into the black hole. However, as seen from the outside, information is never actually destroyed, as matter falling into the black hole appears from the outside to become more and more red-shifted as it approaches (but never ultimately appears to reach) the event horizon.

Ideas of quantum gravity, on the other hand, suggest that there can only be a limited finite entropy (ie a maximum finite amount of information) associated with the space near the horizon; but the change in the entropy of the horizon plus the entropy of the Hawking radiation is always sufficient to take up all of the entropy of matter and energy falling into the black hole.

Many physicists are concerned however that this is still not sufficiently well understood. In particular, at a quantum level, is the quantum state of the Hawking radiation uniquely determined by the history of what has fallen into the black hole; and is the history of what has fallen into the black hole uniquely determined by the quantum state of the black hole and the radiation? This is what determinism, and unitarity, would require.

For a long time Stephen Hawking had opposed such ideas, holding to his original 1975 position that the Hawking radiation is entirely thermal and therefore entirely random, representing new nondeterministically created information. However, on 21 July 2004 he presented a new argument, reversing his previous position.[31] On this new calculation, the entropy associated with the black hole itself would still be inaccessible to external observers; and in the absence of this information, it is impossible to relate in a 1:1 way the information in the Hawking radiation (embodied in its detailed internal correlations) to the initial state of the system. However, if the black hole evaporates completely, then such an identification can be made, and unitarity is preserved. It is not clear how far even the specialist scientific community is yet persuaded by the mathematical machinery Hawking has used (indeed many regard all work on quantum gravity so far as highly speculative); but Hawking himself found it sufficiently convincing to pay out on a bet he had made in 1997 with Caltech physicist John Preskill, to considerable media interest.


[edit] Mathematical theory
Further information: Schwarzschild metric and Deriving the Schwarzschild solution
Black holes are predictions of Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity. There are many known solutions to the Einstein field equations which describe black holes, and they are also thought to be an inevitable part of the evolution of any star of a certain size. In particular, they occur in the Schwarzschild metric, one of the earliest and simplest solutions to Einstein's equations, found by Karl Schwarzschild in 1915. This solution describes the curvature of spacetime in the vicinity of a static and spherically symmetric object, where the metric is,

,
where is a standard element of solid angle.

According to general relativity, a gravitating object will collapse into a black hole if its radius is smaller than a characteristic distance, known as the Schwarzschild radius. (Indeed, Buchdahl's theorem in general relativity shows that in the case of a perfect fluid model of a compact object, the true lower limit is somewhat larger than the Schwarzschild radius.) Below this radius, spacetime is so strongly curved that any light ray emitted in this region, regardless of the direction in which it is emitted, will travel towards the centre of the system. Because relativity forbids anything from traveling faster than light, anything below the Schwarzschild radius – including the constituent particles of the gravitating object – will collapse into the centre. A gravitational singularity, a region of theoretically infinite density, forms at this point. Because not even light can escape from within the Schwarzschild radius, a classical black hole would truly appear black.

The Schwarzschild radius is given by


where G is the gravitational constant, m is the mass of the object, and c is the speed of light. For an object with the mass of the Earth, the Schwarzschild radius is a mere 9 millimeters — about the size of a marble.

The mean density inside the Schwarzschild radius decreases as the mass of the black hole increases, so while an earth-mass black hole would have a density of 2 × 1030 kg/m3, a supermassive black hole of 109 solar masses has a density of around 20 kg/m3, less than water! The mean density is given by


Since the Earth has a mean radius of 6371 km, its volume would have to be reduced 4 × 1026 times to collapse into a black hole. For an object with the mass of the Sun, the Schwarzschild radius is approximately 3 km, much smaller than the Sun's current radius of about 696,000 km. It is also significantly smaller than the radius to which the Sun will ultimately shrink after exhausting its nuclear fuel, which is several thousand kilometers. More massive stars can collapse into black holes at the end of their lifetimes.

The formula also implies that any object with a given mean density is a black hole if its radius is large enough. The same formula applies for white holes as well. For example, if the observable universe has a mean density equal to the critical density, then it is a white hole, since its singularity is in the past and not in the future as should be for a black hole.

More general black holes are also predicted by other solutions to Einstein's equations, such as the Kerr metric for a rotating black hole, which possesses a ring singularity. Then we have the Reissner-Nordström metric for charged black holes. Last the Kerr-Newman metric is for the case of a charged and rotating black hole.

There is also the Black Hole Entropy formula:


Where A is the area of the event horizon of the black hole, is Dirac's constant (the "reduced Planck constant"), k is the Boltzmann constant, G is the gravitational constant, c is the speed of light and S is the entropy.

A convenient length scale to measure black hole processes is the "gravitational radius", which is equal to


When expressed in terms of this length scale, many phenomena appear at integer radii. For example, the radius of a Schwarzschild black hole is two gravitational radii and the radius of a maximally rotating Kerr black hole is one gravitational radius. The location of the light circularization radius around a Schwarzschild black hole (where light may orbit the hole in an unstable circular orbit) is 3rG. The location of the marginally stable orbit, thought to be close to the inner edge of an accretion disk, is at 6rG for a Schwarzschild black hole.


[edit] Alternative models
Several alternative models, which behave like a black hole but avoid the singularity, have been proposed. However, most researchers judge these concepts artificial, as they are more complicated but do not give near term observable differences from black holes (see Occam's razor). The most prominent alternative theory is the Gravastar.

In March 2005, physicist George Chapline at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California proposed that black holes do not exist, and that objects currently thought to be black holes are actually dark-energy stars. He draws this conclusion from some quantum mechanical analyses. Although his proposal currently has little support in the physics community, it was widely reported by the media.[32][33]

Among the alternate models are magnetospheric eternally collapsing objects, clusters of elementary particles[34] (e.g., boson stars[35]), fermion balls,[36] self-gravitating, degenerate heavy neutrinos[37] and even clusters of very low mass (~0.04 solar mass) black holes.[34]


[edit] Black holes and Earth
Black holes are sometimes listed among the most serious potential threats to Earth and humanity.[38][39]There are two principal ways in which they could affect Earth.

There is evidence that some black holes are not stationary, rather, they "wander" through space.[40] There is only a very slim possibility that a rogue black hole might pass near, or even through our Solar System.[41] At a typical speed of stars' relative motion in the Milky Way, it would take a few decades for a black hole to traverse the Solar System, during which time it would wreak havoc on planets' orbits, and possibly affect Earth and Sun directly if it passes near them.
There is a theoretical possibility that a micro black hole might be created inside a particle accelerator.[42] However, many particle collisions that naturally occur as the cosmic rays hit the edge of our atmosphere are often far more energetic than any collisions created by man. If micro black holes can be created this way, it is likely that they are already created every day without our involvement.
Even if, say, two protons at the Large Hadron Collider can merge to create a micro black hole, this black hole would be extremely unstable, and it would vaporize due to Hawking radiation before it had a chance to propagate. For a 14 TeV black hole (the center-of-mass energy at the Large Hadron Collider), direct computation of its lifetime by Hawking formula gives 10-100 seconds.