What if the Sun turned into a black hole? Image credit: NASA/CXC/M.Weiss | More info ›Ħ. This gas forms a disk of hot gas around the black hole, and the wind is driven off this disk at 20 million mph, or about 3% the speed of light. This artist's impression shows how the strong gravity of the black hole, on the left, is pulling gas away from a companion star on the right. NASA’s Chandra X-ray observatory detected record-breaking wind speeds coming from a disk around a black hole. But scientists have observed black holes ripping stars apart, a process that releases a tremendous amount of energy. At the same time, the immense gravity of the black hole would compress you horizontally and stretch you vertically like a noodle, which is why scientists call this phenomenon (no joke) "spaghettification."įortunately, this has never happened to anyone - black holes are too far away to pull in any matter from our solar system. It certainly wouldn't be good! But what we know about the interior of black holes comes from Albert Einstein's General Theory of Relativity.įor black holes, distant observers will only see regions outside the event horizon, but individual observers falling into the black hole would experience quite another "reality." If you got into the event horizon, your perception of space and time would entirely change. What would happen if you fell into a black hole? When a star passes close enough to be swallowed by a black hole, the stellar material is stretched and compressed as it is pulled in, releasing an enormous amount of energy. The black hole is surrounded by a ring of dust. This illustration shows a glowing stream of material from a star disrupted as it was being devoured by a supermassive black hole.
It can take less than a billion years for one to reach a very large size, but it is unknown how long it takes them to form, generally. More mysterious are the giant black holes found at the centers of galaxies - the "supermassive" black holes, which can weigh millions or billions of times the mass of the Sun. Mergers like these also make black holes quickly, and produce ripples in space-time called gravitational waves. A neutron star can also merge with a black hole to make a bigger black hole, or two black holes can collide. These relatively small black holes can also be made through the merger of two dense stellar remnants called neutron stars. How long does it take to make a black hole?Ī stellar-mass black hole, with a mass of tens of times the mass of the Sun, can likely form in seconds, after the collapse of a massive star. Because its light had to travel a very long distance, scientists were observing it at a period when the universe was less than 2 billion years old, just 14% of its current age (almost 14 billion years have passed since the Big Bang). The galaxy’s mass, however, is considered normal. The black hole at the galaxy’s center is nearly 7 billion times the mass of our Sun, placing it among the most massive black holes discovered. In 2015, researchers discovered a black hole named CID-947 that grew much more quickly than its host galaxy. The immense gravity of black holes also distorts space itself, so it is possible to see the influence of an invisible gravitational pull on stars and other objects. Matter is heated to millions of degrees as it is pulled toward the black hole, so it glows in X-rays. NASA's telescopes that study black holes are looking at the surrounding environments of the black holes, where there is material very close to the event horizon. No light of any kind, including X-rays, can escape from inside the event horizon of a black hole, the region beyond which there is no return. How can we learn about black holes if they trap light, and can't actually be seen? Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Roma Tre Univ.ġ. This supermassive black hole has been extensively studied due to its relatively close proximity to our galaxy. The X-ray light is coming from an active supermassive black hole, also known as a quasar, in the center of the galaxy. High-energy X-rays (magenta) captured by NASA's Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array, or NuSTAR, are overlaid on visible-light images from both NASA's Hubble Space Telescope and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. Galaxy NGC 1068 is shown in visible light and X-rays in this composite image.
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