That’s when the excess matter they’ve seized creates a hot swirling pool of doom around it called an accretion disk.
Ravenous, black holes consume anything that gets too close. To find a black hole, researchers instead had to look at how these monsters interact with matter. The only data that can be collected directly from a black hole is its spin and size. However, contrary to the name, black holes are not (always) entirely invisible.įor years, these objects were only theorized because, by their nature, nothing can escape their clutches they remained hidden. This is the spherical boundary beyond which nothing, not even light, can escape a black hole’s clutches. Encapsulating the singularity lies what most people picture when they think of a black hole: the event horizon. German theoretical physicist Karl Schwarzschild was the first to use Einstein’s theory of general relativity to show this point was mathematically possible. It is here that the black hole truly lives. To really understand a black hole, you need to understand its anatomy.Īt the center of a black hole lies the singularity, a theoretical point in space which has zero volume but contains all of the object’s mass. But although they are well documented, exactly how they first formed is still up for debate. These gravitational Goliaths reside in the centers of most, if not all, galaxies. There are also supermassive black holes, which weigh in at millions to billions of times the mass of the Sun. Alternatively, the merger of a binary neutron star system could also create an object too massive to sustain itself as anything except a black hole.
It must syphon enough material from a nearby binary companion that it eventually climbs about the mass threshold needed to collapse into a black hole. Such stars are destined to become stellar-mass black holes upon their deaths.īut stellar old age isn’t the only way to form a black hole.Ī white dwarf or neutron star remnant from a smaller star can also become a stellar-mass black hole, but it needs some help. But in the case of the most massive stars, nothing can stop the crushing collapse. For stars slightly more massive than the Sun, those collapsing outer layers rebound off the star’s core, detonating it as a supernova. In the most basic sense, the outer shell of the star, with no internal pressure to support it, implodes. At this point, the inward crush of gravity has the upper hand.
After silicon, however, the star’s core is basically a hunk of iron, at which point no further energy can be unlocked through nuclear fusion. Following this hydrogen-burning phase, the most massive stars are hot enough to burn through their helium (just like less massive stars), then carbon, neon, oxygen, and, finally, silicon. This converts the hydrogen to helium and creates an outward pressure that counteracts the inward force of gravity. Stars in the primes of their lives, like the Sun, burn hydrogen in their cores through a process known as nuclear fusion. (If you’re wondering, our petite Sun is too small to collapse into a black hole and instead will one day become a white dwarf). The smallest stellar-mass black holes come from stars packed with at least 2 to 3 times the mass of our Sun. Not every star has the potential to become a black hole only the most massive reach this coveted status. That sounds like a lot, until you consider there are an estimated 100 to 400 billion stars in our galaxy.īut what exactly are stellar-mass black holes? And how do these mysterious voids in space differ from their supersized cousins? In our Milky Way alone, there are an estimated ten million to one billion stellar-mass black holes. Stellar-mass black holes - which weigh between a few and 100 times the mass of the Sun - speckle the universe.
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