Essay on Black Holes

Karen Liu The Black Hole and the
Golden Key of our Universe

Many people have often heard of the word Black Hole in astronomy. Given this chance to research about this mysterious object in the Universe, I decided to share my knowledge with you. The Universe is a fascinating world of wonders, many times more complex than that of on Earth, and that is the reason it draws me toward it. Many questions have bombarded me throughout this research, and many have been answered. Through the research and careful planning of many astronomers, cosmologists, and theoretical physicists, these facts have been presented to me in a wonderful, perplexing way.

Let us begin with the life cycle of a star. When this red supergiant or dying star runs out of hydrogen fuel, the burned fuel expands in a huge shell of gas while the central regions collapse in on themselves. If the mass of the star is more than 2.1 times the mass of our own sun, then the inner regions will never stop collapsing on itself and… ta da! A black hole has been formed!

It would be like putting all of Earth’s buildings and the things and materials inside of it into a tiny baby food jar. That would be impossible to squeeze into, but this is what it is like with a super giant star. The pull of gravity in the collapsing regions will be so strong that it sucks other planets and stars into it. Just like feeding a pig, the more stars, dust, and gas it sucks in, the bigger the black hole gets. This is true for many super massive of massive black holes in the centers of many known galaxies, one being our very own Milky Way. Why? Because these clusters of stars and centers of galaxies are regions that will already contain black holes, neutron stars, and of course, stars. Collisions between these black holes and other objects will evidently produce a growing super massive black hole that swallows anything and everything-including light- that comes near it.

The edge of these black holes is called the “horizon”. The horizon is like the edge of a waterfall. If you paddle away from it fast enough, you might be able to escape with your life. If you don’t, then you fall down and reach the point of no return.

Now that the basics are down, we come to these simple questions. How, How, How??? The answer itself is not that simple. But facts and theories can be provided to further enrich your fidgeting mind and your hunger for knowledge of our Universe.

One main question is; how do scientists and people like us see these black holes? The answer is quite simple. You can’t. This is because light even gets sucked into black holes, and since nothing is faster than light, nothing can escape it. The result is a totally pitch black space in the Universe where there is nothing. Even so, you can detect a black hole by the way gravity pulls on other things. So by looking at orbiting stars, gases, and dust that circle and get sucked into nothing, you can infer that a black hole is located in that region.

Now comes to the part where wonder comes into mind. What would happen to us if we fell into a black hole? You would fall into a black hole just like you would fall into the Sun. If you fell feet first, the gravity from the black hole would pull you out and squish you and make you taller. All this squeezing and stretching is weaker the bigger the black hole is. So if you fell into a black hole only a few times larger than our sun, you would get stretched, squeezed, and, technically, spaghettified (it’s a scientific word!) long before you reached the horizon. If you fell into a much bigger black hole though, you would pass the horizon and point of no return without noticing anything unusual.

However, someone watching you fall in would never see you cross the horizon because gravity warps time and space. All they would see is that you would slow down and get dimmer because the light takes longer to reach them.

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