black hole

     

A black hole is a region of space in which the gravitational fiel is so powerful that nothing, not even light, can escape its pull after having fallen past its event horizon. The term "Black Hole" comes from the fact that, at a certain point, even electromagnetic radiation (e.g. visible light) is unable to break away from the attraction of these massive objects. This renders the hole's interior invisible or, rather, black like the appearance of space itself.

Trivia about black hole

  • This concept dates to a 1783 paper by John Michell, who theorized about a body with the sun's density & 500 times its diameter
  • With a mass of 4.31 millions Suns, Sagittarius A* is thought to be a supermassive one of these in the Milky Way's center
  • If a star larger than 3 solar masses completely burns its nuclear fuel, theory says it'll collapse into this
  • Cygnus X-1 offers scientists the best evidence of this stellar phenomenon
  • This term for a star that's undergone a complete gravitational collapse was coined in the '60s
  • John Wheeler named this singularity in the late 1960s; the Russians called it a collapsar
  • Predicted as early as 1784, this body is so dense that light can't escape its gravitational pull
  • In 1986 astronomers found a massive one of these at the center of the Milky Way galaxy
  • Karl Schwarzschild has a type of this named after him; Schwarz is a clue
  • In the center of galaxy NGC-4261 is one of these powerful objects surrounded by a disk of dust
  • The nearby Andromeda Galaxy has a supermassive one of these at its center
  • Theoretically, its gravitational field is so intense that no electromagnetic radiation can escape
  • Astronomers think the Andromeda Spiral may have one of these collapsed stars at its center
  • An area in space where the pull of gravity is so strong nothing can escape, not even light
  • John Archibald Wheeler coined this term in the '60s for a collapsed star so dense, no light can escape it
  • Many astronomers believe the Great Andromeda spiral galaxy has one of these "dark" collapsed stars at its center
  • (I'm astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson.) In my latest book, "Death by" one of these, I refer to a process called spaghettification, in which differences in gravity across your body stretch you long & thin
  • In 1994 the Hubble Space Telescope provided the first conclusive proof of one of these collapsed stars of immense gravity
  • Sir Roger Penrose, with Stephen Hawking, proved that all matter within one of these collapses to a singularity

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