at it’s essence, what is a black hole anyway?
It is certainly a couple clicks up the Intergalactic scale of destructive entities, above a demoncRatically controlled Congre$$, but not by much. ;-)
Hey , a black hole has got to do what a black hole has to do.. and like Vegas,, what gets sucked in the black hole, stays in the black hole. or does it? :-}
There’s one in the White House right now.
“at it’s essence, what is a black hole anyway?”
A black hole is an object which has an escape velocity greater than the speed of light. The distance from the center (singularity) where the gravity gets that intense is called the “event horizon”. It is currently thought impossible for an object or information from an object to return to the “normal universe” once the object has crossed the event horizon. There is strong observational evidence that every galaxy has a black hole in the center, up to over 1 billion solar masses in size. The black holes at the center of galaxies eat gas, dust and the occasional star.
The “normal” way for a black hole to form is from a star of several times the Sun’s mass (below that they form white dwarfs or neutron stars). White dwarfs and neutron stars form when the nuclear fusion power source at the center of the star runs out of fuel. For stars in this size range, gravity crushes the inert mass of the star until all this is left is a sea of elementary particles (white dwarf) or neutrons (neutron star). The process of forming the black hole usually involves a supernova stellar explosion, as is the case for neutron stars also. The difference is that with black hole formation, the star is more massive and when the neutron star forms, the gravity is so intense it overcomes the integral resistance of neutrons to being crushed. The neutrons then compress towards a point mass, and the physical surface withdraws within the event horizon.
Just as a for instance, the event horizon of a 20 million solar mass black hole is quite a bit smaller than (~20%) the Earth’s orbit. Of course, if something that massive replaced the Sun, the Earth’s year would only be about two hours long. ;^)