Black Hole?

Question

can someone please explain to me in ENGLISH what in sam hell is a Black Hole! I read about it, but some reason I can not understand it.

Answer 1

One of the properties of matter is gravity. The more matter the more gravity it will have. When you have enough matter together, the force of gravity will make atoms collapse. That is to say that the electrons around the nuclei will merge creating neutrons. When this happens matter becomes very dense. If you pack enough matter then every single atom will collapse into a single point in space. When this happens in order to 'fly' away from the gravity field of this singular spot you need to travel at a speed higher than the speed of light, since general relativity does not allow that it means that you'll inevitably fall into it. So a Black Hole swallows everything in it's path, including light thus the name.

You need a star about 30 larger than the sun to create a black hole (most of the matter is dispersed during the formation) and black holes have a minimum threshold of about 5 solar masses and end up 'wheighing' from 1.4 to 10 solar masses.

Answer 2

When a star 'dies', the core of the star collapses under its own gravity. Differently-sized stars collapse in different ways, however.

Stars the size of our Sun collapse until the repulsion of the electrons orbiting the atoms supports the weight of the star. This is known as a white dwarf, which gradually cools, turning into a brown dwarf.

Stars somewhat larger than our sun collapse further. The stronger gravity overpowers electron repulsion, and all the electrons are actually ejected from collapsing star, carrying the protons with them. Only the neutrons remain. Since neutrons have no charge, the star collapses until the "strong nuclear force" (one of the fundamental forces of the universe) supports the weight of the star. At this point, you have a neutron star, which is extremely dense. A cubic centimeter of neutron star would weigh TRILLIONS of pounds, to give you an idea of how dense it is. A spinning neutron star that emits radiation is known as a pulsar.

However, some stars are so large that not even the strong nuclear force can keep them from collapsing. These stars continue collapsing until they vanish into a point. The star has collapsed completely. It has zero volume. It is now a black hole, which is not really a "hole" at all, just a point in space with infinite density.

Surrounding the black hole is a spherical region where the gravity is so strong that even light cannot escape. The boundary of this region is known as the "event horizon". Once light crosses over the event horizon, it cannot escape.

However, it should be noted that if you were 1 million miles away from a star, then the star collapsed, becoming a black hole, the gravity would not increase. The only reason a very large star doesn't have an event horizon is that it's so spread out.

Answer 3

Picture a baseball. Not that big, not that heavy.
Now picture a bowling ball, a little bigger but a lot heavier.

So now picture a really HUGE star, one say 10 times the mass of our own average sun.
A star is bright and hot because it is burning hydrogen in its center and that heat keeps all those tons of mass from collapsing from its own weight. But the bigger the star the faster it burns its hydrogen fuel (like a race car uses fuel faster than a Honda). And when the hydrogen runs out, the center of the star stars burning the ash from the hydrogen burning (that ash is helium). That burns even hotter than hydrogen, so the star puffs up from the heat in the centre (and as it gets bigger the surface cools off a little and it becomes more red than yellow).

Okay.

Now, at some point that huge star has burned all its helium, and it starts burning the ash left over (I won't go into all the levels of ash burning).
But at one point the "ash" left over is iron. And iron doesn't release energy (which the star needs to keep from collapsing), so all of a sudden you have these billions of tons of mass just waiting, and no heat or anything else to keep them from crashing into the centre of the star.
Well, drop billions of tons of mass on something and you get a really big explosion.
If the star isn't too massive, it will blow itself to tiny bits and what may be left over is just a tiny hot coal slowly cooling off.
But if its really big, then strange mathematics takes over here.
The mass is so great that nothing can stop it from collapsing.
Think of a bridge - too many heavy trucks and the bridge collapses. Same thing with this huge star, only there is nothing else to hold things up.
So it keeps on collapsing to an infinitely small point but still with all that billions of tons of mass compressed into a tiny space.

That is a black hole.
Its surface gravity is so strong that not even light has enough speed to escape.

Okay, I've typed enough.
I hope you read it all and that it helped.

Answer 4

A black hole is a lot of matter crammed into a small space, it is usually the remains of a collapsed star, it has intense gravity and because it is so small the space around it is tightly curved, light follows this curve and can't escape the black hole, that is why it can't be seen but their presence is detected by the motion of star gas being pulled into the black hole.

Answer 5

Easy, a black hole is an object with gravity so great that, at a certian point, light cannot escape, it is infinently small, with infinite mass.

Answer 6

Hi. It is the area around a super massive object that bends space so much the light goes into orbit.

Answer 7

It occurs when a huge star dies and its gravity was so large it starts to pull in on itself. And eventually grows, and the bigger it gets the stronger it is, and nothing, not even light, can escape it...