The Mysteries and Explorations and Explanations of Black Holes

Black holes have become a relatively recent phenomenon within the science and more specifically, the physics community. Their introduction has stirred up massive debate within the community and many scientists have tried to explain them through mathematical means, as theories, and consequently because of the mathematical explanations, they make sense. Black holes are said to be incredibly massive and have such an intense gravitational force, that they literally slow down light and pull it in. Consequently, it is said that nothing can escape a black hole. To get an idea of how massive a black hole can be, consider the mass of the Earth. A black hole with the mass of the Earth would only be about the size of a dime. In origin, however, “black holes consist of a location where matter densities approach infinity (a “singularity”) surrounded by an empty zone of extreme gravitation from which nothing, not even light can escape” (Barceló, 2009).

Black holes are originally formed from the “dark remnants of collapsed stars” and “harbor unfathomable mystery behind the curtain that is its ‘event horizon’” (Barceló, 2009). A black hole can arise from massive clouds of gas as opposed to the death of a star in some instances, forming when a blobs of interstellar gas collapse under their own weight without forming stars (Ionescu & Klainerman, 2009). Another mysterious but defining characteristic of a black hole is the event horizon. The event horizon is a “causal boundary that separates the interior and exterior of a black hole, and prevents any signal originating from the interior from reaching the exterior” (Barausse et al., 2013).

While they are still being explored and discussed, at one point they were considered and supposed to be “perfect trapping systems at the classic level” (Lochan & Chakraborty, 2016). Furthermore black holes display thermal characteristics and this thought is furthered by Stephen Hawking showing black holes to be radiating “at a characteristic temperature inversely proportional to their masses” allowing for this idea of a black hole to have entropy which turns out to be proportional to their area of horizon, in the Einstein theory (Lochan & Chakraborty, 2016).

As surprising as it is, black holes have their own category of being supermassive as well. The irony being that they are incredibly massive enough. They are thought to be the sites from which “the highest energy cosmic rays are launched” and can be around hundred million times “more energetic than the highest energy particles that are currently being produced at the Large Hadron Collider” (Maccarone, 2014). To add on to this incredibly massed phenomenon, the merging of black holes sounds simply catastrophic, and it would be since the merging is “a likely source of strong gravitational radiation” (Maccarone, 2014). There is much to ponder about black holes and they are still very much only theoretical.

Figure 1. Space time diagram (schematic) of a black hole with a universal origin (Barausse et al., 2013).

Works Cited:

Barausse, Enrico, and Thomas P Sotiriou. “Black Holes In Lorentz-Violating Gravity Theories.” Classical & Quantum Gravity 30.24 (2013): 244010-244031.

Barceló, Carlos, et al. “Black Stars, Not Holes.” Scientific American 301.4 (2009): 38-45.

Ionescu, Alexandru D., and Sergiu Klainerman. “On The Uniqueness Of Smooth, Stationary Black Holes In Vacuum.” Inventiones Mathematicae 175.1 (2009): 35-102.

Lochan, Kinjalk, and Sumanta Chakraborty. “Discrete Quantum Spectrum Of Black Holes.” Physics Letters B 755.(2016): 37-42.

Maccarone, Thomas. “Black Hole Studies: Overview And Outlook.” Space Science Reviews 183.1-4 (2014): 477-489.