• Question: Can you explain black holes

    Asked by Lord Tachanka to Xu, Leah-Nani, Kathryn, Ian, Hina, Andrew on 13 Jun 2018. This question was also asked by Lil_Doomerang.
    • Photo: Leah-Nani Alconcel

      Leah-Nani Alconcel answered on 13 Jun 2018:

      A black hole forms when a massive star collapses. It can then suck in mass from its surroundings, including other stars. Nothing can escape from it (including light). There’s one at the centre of our galaxy. It’s a good thing our Solar System is out on one of the galaxy’s arms, no?

    • Photo: Andrew Margetts-Kelly

      Andrew Margetts-Kelly answered on 13 Jun 2018:

      Black holes are found where there is a lot of matter in the same place. If you keep putting more matter in eventually the gravity becomes so much that everything gets squashed into a very small space. For the amount of matter they contain black holes are very very small, a black hole with the mass of 1000 suns will only be the size of Earth.
      It’s their compactness that makes them dangerous to anything straying too close. The gravity is soooooo strong at the Event Horizon (that’s the edge of the black hole) it will suck anything in and it’ll never escape (not even light can escape).

    • Photo: Kathryn Burrows

      Kathryn Burrows answered on 13 Jun 2018:

      1) Accept the fact that there is a thing called matter, with the following property: matter attracts other matter. That is it feels a force pulling it together which we call the gravitational force.

      2) A black hole is simply a region with so much matter that nothing can escape. Past a certain point known as the ‘event horizon’ everything gets pulled down into the black hole and never returns! That is why we call it a hole.

      We call it black because that is how it appears, as black is the colour you see in the absense of light. From the theory of general relativity matter affects light by bending space-time, a black hole has so much matter than not even light can escape once it has crossed the event horizon.

      The current theory is that black holes form when stars die and implode.

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