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Black Hole

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Black hole. Black hole. A black hole is defined as a region of spacetime from which gravity prevents anything, including light, from escaping.[1] The theory of general relativity predicts that a sufficiently compact mass will deform spacetime to form a black hole.[2] Around a black hole, there is a mathematically defined surface called an event horizon that marks the point of no return.

Black hole

The hole is called "black" because it absorbs all the light that hits the horizon, reflecting nothing, just like a perfect black body in thermodynamics.[3][4] Quantum field theory in curved spacetime predicts that event horizons emit radiation like a black body with a finite temperature. This temperature is inversely proportional to the mass of the black hole, making it difficult to observe this radiation for black holes of stellar mass or greater.

Objects whose gravity fields are too strong for light to escape were first considered in the 18th century by John Michell and Pierre-Simon Laplace. History General relativity. Black Holes. NOTE: This section is about stellar-mass black holes.

Black Holes

For information about black holes that measure in the billions of solar masses, see Active Galaxies & Quasars . There are many popular myths concerning black holes, many of them perpetuated by Hollywood. Television and movies have portrayed them as time-traveling tunnels to another dimension, cosmic vacuum cleaners sucking up everything in sight, and so on. It can be said that black holes are really just the evolutionary end point of massive stars. But somehow, this simple explanation makes them no less mysterious, and no easier to understand.

Black holes: What are they? Black holes are the evolutionary endpoints of stars at least 10 to 15 times as massive as the Sun. But contrary to popular myth, a black hole is not a cosmic vacuum cleaner. The Schwarzschild radius can be calculated using the equation for escape speed: vesc = (2GM/R)1/2 R = 2GM/c2 If we can't see them, how do we know they are there? Last Modified: December 2010. The Largest Black Holes in the Universe. BLACK HOLES by Ted Bunn. What is a black hole?

BLACK HOLES by Ted Bunn

--------------------- Loosely speaking, a black hole is a region of space that has so much mass concentrated in it that there is no way for a nearby object to escape its gravitational pull. Since our best theory of gravity at the moment is Einstein's general theory of relativity, we have to delve into some results of this theory to understand black holes in detail, but let's start of slow, by thinking about gravity under fairly simple circumstances. Suppose that you are standing on the surface of a planet. You throw a rock straight up into the air. Assuming you don't throw it too hard, it will rise for a while, but eventually the acceleration due to the planet's gravity will make it start to fall down again. Now imagine an object with such an enormous concentration of mass in such a small radius that its escape velocity was greater than the velocity of light. In general relativity, gravity is a manifestation of the curvature of spacetime.