| Regarded as wild speculation for centuries, and still a staple of science fiction, it took the work of Albert Einstein and a new view of gravity as the curving of "spacetime" to transform black holes from fiction into plausible science. |
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When we talk about black holes and the science of black holes, what we are really talking about is what's happening when gravity is the most important thing going on around us, and nothing else really matters.
Stephen Murray
Assoc. Dir., High Energy Astrophysics Div.
Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics
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By the 1930's we'd discovered enough about the life cycle of our Sun and other stars to come up with theories about the physical processes that might be involved.
Black holes are made in supernova explosions. Really, a star has to go supernova to make a black hole, and in that explosion where the star goes out, there is a core of the star that actually collapses in, and that core may either form a neutron star, or if there is enough matter falling in in this core, it'll just keep on falling beyond the neutron star. It will fall even further down and it will form a black hole. |
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Stars burn their fuel by fusion and create heat, and heat creates pressure, and the pressure pushes out while gravity is trying to pull in. And when the fuel runs out and there's no more pressure pushing out, gravity wins, pulls things closer and closer together, and if you have the right conditions, gravity wins so hard that you actually have everything collapsing to what we call a "singularity," a point, and that's the origin of a black hole. Stephen Murray Assoc. Dir., High Energy Astrophysics Div. Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics |
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Amazing Facts About Black Holes
Frequently Asked Questions About Black Holes
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