Can someone please explain in terms a 10 year old would understand what a black hole is?

Question

Ty.

Answer 1

It's a Roach Motel for light waves. Light goes in, but doesn't come out.

Answer 2

Maybe you have seen one of those devices in a science museum or other places--it looks like a big sort of funnel or trumpet, and you put a penny in a slot at the top (wide part). The penny slides through and starts to circle around the mouth of the funnel thing. It goes round and round, but of course there is friction and stuff to slow the penny down a bit, and as it loses speed, it circles closer and closer (and lower and lower) into the neck of the funnel.

The circles get smaller and smaller and quicker and quicker, and finally the penny disappears forever down the neck of the funnel. This is pretty much how a black hole behaves, except that instead of being a funnel, it is a ball in space, like the sun. Most black holes are probably not even as big as the sun, in fact. Objects, dust, gas, junk all circle around the black hole just like the earth goes around the sun or the moon goes around the earth, and if they are far enough away, they circle around the black hole forever, no problem.

Right now we and the whole earth and the sun and all the stars you can see in the sky at night are circling around the rather large black hole at the center of the milky way, and you can't tell it's happening. In fact, nobody knew about this until a few years ago.

However, stuff that is closer to the black hole is in more trouble. If things start to circle close enough to it, the black hole slows them down just like the penny slows down, by a kind of friction, and once they slow down, they get closer to the hole, and go around quicker. Well, you know where this is going. In a comparatively short time, the objects end up merging with the black hole and make it even heavier than it already was. In the process, a lot of energy is given off. You can't hope to imagine (and neither can anybody else) what it would look like to be very close to a black hole, because it is a crazy place full of deadly radiation and heat.

Nobody knows if you can make smallish black holes. They would be very interesting since they would not be so violent to be near, and maybe you could use one for something.

Answer 3

OK, you know how gravity works, right? Every single object in the universe is attracted to every other one, and the attraction gets stronger the closer the two objects are and the more massive they are. Now the reason you can't just jump off the Earth is because you can't jump fast enough to overcome Earth's gravity. The force of gravity between you and the Earth is stronger than your leg muscles, so you always fall back down. But other things--light things like hydrogen, which doesn't feel the force of gravity so strongly, and fast things like rockets, which can create an even stronger force--they can get away from the Earth.

Well, think about a bigger, heavier planet, like Jupiter. Jupiter's gravity is stronger than Earth's because Jupiter is bigger. So even hydrogen is too heavy to get away from Jupiter like it can from Earth, and you'd need a more powerful rocket to take off if you started there.

Now the lightest and fastest thing in the universe is light. Light doesn't even have a "rest mass"--that means if it stood still, it wouldn't weigh anything. But according to Einstein's Theory of Relativity, energy and matter are the same thing. A lot of energy is the same thing as a little bit of matter, and since light's always moving, it has energy. So it has a little bit of mass, and gravity affects it a little.

A black hole is an object (usually a collapsed star, but some are so big they must originally have been whole galaxies) that's so massive that not even light is light enough or fast enough to get away from it. That's why they're called "black holes"--because they don't put off any light.

The gravity of a black hole pulls on the bits of matter that make up the black hole, too, sort of crushing it from the inside out. Every piece is pulled toward the center, so the black hole winds up being really small and dense. In fact, according to one theory it becomes infinitely small and dense--all the matter in the black hole is pulled to a tiny point in the exact center, called a singularity. Anything that gets too close to the black hole will be pulled into the singularity. Other theories say that it's impossible to be infinitely small, so the black hole must just be really, really small (but still have a finite volume). So far, no one has volunteered to go inside a black hole and find out. :)

Wikipedia has a pretty good article on black holes. Maybe you should look there for more information.

Answer 4

10 years is a little young to understand the physics behind a black hole, and that is the only real way to desribe it.
But lets try.

A black hole is a very very big object in space, bigger than any other single thing out there.
Now, the bigger something is, the more gravity it has, and gravity makes us feel weight. Like the Earth is bigger than the moon, so we weigh more on Earth than we would on the moon because of gravity.
Well, a black hole is a lot bigger than the Earth, so it has a lot more gravity. In fact, it has so much gravity that even light isn't fast enough to escape. Since we see things by the light they give off or reflect, if something doesn't let light escape we can't see it - so its black.
And its a hole because anything falling in can't escape either.
So we call it a black hole.

But don't worry, there are no black holes anywhere near Earth, the closest one is over 20,000 light years away (that's a very long way, and if you were to drive in your car it would take over 1 billion years to get there.

Answer 5

Stars are made of burning mass. Lots of it. Eventually, all the mass burns out and the star collapses. A few different things can happen, one is that the matter collapses "forever." This causes crazy gravitational fields. People, solar systems, asteroids or whatever can safely orbit black holes just like the sun. However, if you get close enough, inside what is called the "Schwarzschild Radius" or the "event horizon," then space is so curved that no matter what direction you travel in, you're heading toward the center. Even light can't escape, hence the name "black hole."

Answer 6

You know what a bully is, well, a black hole is something like a bully, it does not have to be big but it has to be very heavy(massive.) A very massive object creates a lot of gravity and it has the ability to pull anything that comes close to it right into it, this makes it even more massive. I hope this helps.

Answer 7

Everything with mass in the universe attracts everything else with mass. That's called gravity. So, in a star, gravity attracts everything towards its center, just like on earth. Normally, as you compress matter, pressure builds up and resists this attraction, but if you put to much mass in one place and really squish it down to high density, gravity increases faster than pressure can push back and gravity wins big time. The mass collapses and collapses so much that space itself gets stretched to infinite length and the stuff just collapses forever and ever and nothing every comes back up, even light. It's kinda like a hole gets punched in space with no bottom. Supernovae can create such conditions at their core, so they sometimes leave such black holes behind.

Answer 8

Its not a hole...its a star...sort of.

A black hole is so heavy, so dense that it makes ALOT of gravity. The same force that makes us "stick" to the surface of the earth. The black hole's gravity is so strong that nothing can get away from it, not even light. Remember, light is a physical substance, just like peanut butter...only ALOT thinner and much faster. Also, light doesn't stick to the roof of your mouth.

Answer 9

Lindajune has it almost right - except that she meant that a black hole is more massive than the Earth, or the Sun, or 20 suns, but not bigger. It's a singularity - it's all compressed down into a dot smaller than the period of this sentence. It's incredibly massive, but incredibly small.

Answer 10

tell him/her to imagine a vacuum cleaner
i think that's the easiest way a ten year old can understand a black hole

Answer 11

a black hole is a hungry vacuum that uses what it eats as energy.