From getting turned into spaghetti to findingthe end of space, here are 9 mind-blowing facts about black holes!!!! 9. How are they formed? A black hole is a place where gravity is sostrong that not even light can escape. So how does this happen? It’s all caused by dying stars. When smaller stars begin to burn out and dieover billions of years, they become dense, neutron stars.
When a star at least about 3 times largerthan our sun dies, it creates a supernova explosion and if it is big enough, it willcollapse in on itself from the force of gravity. A supernova explosion lasts just about 100seconds!! Stars between 8 and 50 times the mass of oursun, exhaust their hydrogen core over millions of years but it takes just seconds for itto collapse!! As the star collapses, it reaches a certainpoint called “the event horizon” and time on the star slows down. When it reaches the event horizon it can’tcollapse anymore, and the final end of the star is the beginning of a black hole. 8. How big are black holes? Black holes come in many sizes. Can you believe the smallest ones can be thesize of an atom?? Even though that may be tiny, it has the massof a large mountain!! Scientists believe that there are mini blackholes all around the universe, and possibly even on Earth. Why don't we feel them? Well, they're so small, and their gravityis so unimpactful that we just don’t feel them. This was actually the basis of an episodeof the sci-fi show Eureka. To be fair though, none of these mini blackholes have been observed as of yet. But, scientists have been able to make minisculeaudio black holes where no sound can escape. So it may only be a matter of time. The largest black holes are considered “supermassive”and have more mass than 1 million suns together. Fun fact: Scientists have found that everylarge galaxy has a supermassive black hole at the center, including ours!! Does anyone know what it’s called?? Leave your guess in the comments below! The answer is coming up!! And if you are new here, be sure to subscribeand join the Origins Explained family!!!! 7. SpaghettificationWhat the heck is spaghettification?? It is a scientific term, I promise. Scientists can have fun too!! Also known as the “noodle effect”, itis when things are stretched into long thin shapes, like spaghetti, because of very stronggravitational forces. While this may sound funny, it is NOT somethingyou want to happen to you!! Or anyone!! Scientists are hotly debating what would happenif you fell into a black hole. Hypothetically, if you reached the event horizon,gravity would be so strong that you would be stretched out violently by the gravityfield into a one-molecule wide string. Long story short, your body would be infinitelystretched as it gets pulled closer and closer to the center of the black hole. Your body will be kept together, but stretcheduntil you reach atomic levels of thinness. For you, time would begin to stand still becauseyou would be moving at the speed of light, or something like it. But, for someone who is on the outside lookingin, they have a much different view of what's going on. Remember I said that light doesn't escapea black hole, so of course no one can really "view" what's happening inside of the blackhole.
So, to the outside viewer, the person gettingSpaghettified won't look that way. What would you see? A freeze frame image for lack of a betterterm. They would see the last possible image ofthe person who had just crossed over into the black holes gravitational fieldThat image would remain for some time until it would eventually change color and vanishwith no sign of spaghettification, because it would all happen so fast!! Any object’s molecules that are pulled intothe gravitational field of the black hole would be ripped to shreds. And after that?? That is the question. 6. Black Holes Can Create StarsWhile you might think that black holes destroy everything, that’s not entirely true. When gigantic black holes form from a supernova,so much material explodes off far into space that they can create entire new stars!! An article was published in the journal Naturethat said that supermassive black holes not only create new stars, but also control howmany stars a galaxy gets!! Supermassive behemoth black holes can sometimesunloose enough material to form whole new stars. These black holes directly impact how quicklythe process of star formation stops. They say that star formation stops more quicklyin galaxies with smaller black holes in the center. 5. Black Holes produce a lot of energy! How is that possible? It has to do with the event horizon of theblack hole.
The closer things get to that event horizon,the faster things move as the gravitational force gets stronger. As all the material gathers around the eventhorizon and starts orbiting around, it gets faster and faster. Because of the speed it heats up, and it getsREALLY hot, like billions of degrees Fahrenheit hot. Things act differently at this temperature!!! This extreme heat transforms the mass fromthe material into blackbody radiation, which is a form of energy. Now, this is significant for the followingreason. Here on Earth, our best nuclear fusion processcan take .7% of mass, and turn it into energy. Because of how the black hole works, it canconvert 10% of mass into energy. See the difference? In fact, this is so extraordinary in the mindsof some scientists that they think this radiation and process could be used to power spaceshipsin the future!! Interestingly enough, black holes can alsoevaporate and disappear over time. Stephen Hawking predicted this discovery in1974. Now called Hawking radiation, it evaporatesinto space little by little until there is nothing left. 4. How many black holes are there? As you now know, there are many differentsized black holes in the universe, including some that are too tiny to see. But even if we just talked about the oneswe could see, there are actually too many too count. Just within our Milky Way Galaxy, there arebelieved to be about 100 million black holes of the "stellar mass" variety. (Which is between the “atom size” andthe “supermassive” size). That's a lot. How do we know this?? The Milky Way galaxy has about 100 billionstars. Based on that, about one out of every thousandstars is massive enough to become a black holes. So our galaxy probably has around 100 millionblack holes. Out of all of these, only about 12 have beenidentified. The nearest one is about 1,600 light yearsaway, soooo…..that’s one less thing to worry about!! 3. Do black holes consume everything? Contrary to popular belief, black holes don’tgo around sucking the life force out of stars and eating everything in sight. While you might think that nothing escapesblack holes, that’s not necessarily the case. Light doesn't escape black holes. Surprisingly, there are cases of black holes"spitting out" certain objects into the universe. To be fair, not every black hole can do this,in fact, the only recorded cases of this are with the Supermassive Black Holes, you know,the ones that are billions of times bigger than our sun? Anyway, matter can apparently slip by theaccretion disk within the black hole, which means it doesn't enter the "point of no return",as such, the gravity of the black hole will actually "spit" it back out. These "spitballs" can be the size of planets!! ANSWER: For those of you who guessed, thesupermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy is SAGITTARIUS A. It has a mass equalto about 4 million suns and would fit inside a very large ball that could hold a few millionEarths!! In the case of Sagittarius A, these chunksare spewed into the galaxy at a rate of 20 million miles per hour. Hopefully not too close to our solar system!! 2. How strong is a black hole? Now that you know that black holes can’tconsume everything in sight, and aren’t cosmic vacuums, just how strong is a blackhole? It’s gravity doesn’t reach out infinitely. They are confined by a very basic law: thestrength of gravity depends on its mass. For example, take the Earth. The Earth has a certain amount of gravityattributed to it, which is why we can hold the moon in an orbit. Now, imagine a black hole suddenly appearedin the galaxy, and it was the exact same size as Earth. The gravity field it emits would be the sameas Earth's. If you replaced the sun with a black holeof the same mass, the Earth would not get sucked in. It would just keep orbiting in the same way. Now, once you crossover past the event horizoninto the black hole itself, you'll begin to feel its pull. If you're outside of it? You're perfectly safe. Just make sure you know how big the blackhole is before you get close to it, ok? Jokes aside, you may have seen images of matterfrom a star getting sucked into a black hole but it’s actually stellar wind that is gettingpulled in. Not the whole life of the star!
1. What is at the center? When I was telling you about spaghettification,I mentioned that hypothetically, if you passed the event horizon, gravity would be so strongthat you would be stretched out violently by the gravity field into a one-molecule widestring. But you would think that in theory, thosemolecules would get pulled into the center of the black hole. But what does that mean?? Einstein believed that that was the end. After that, everything was over. BUT a physicist from the University of California,Santa Barbara, Joe Polchinski says that the inside of a black hole might not exist. He says that there is no inside at all, andit is probably the end of space itself!! As if black holes weren’t already superabstract and difficult to understand, there is a huge mystery with black holes. Quantum physics theory states that informationcan never disappear so your atoms could be “rearranged”, but in theory you shouldbe able to see those atoms and tell that they were once a part of a human. But if a black hole evaporates like StephenHawking showed, then that means everything vanishes with it. Another confusing aspect is that the coreof a black hole is infinitely small, yet has infinite mass. What's more, time and space bend around thecore, so time actually slows down, and space is literally swallowed into it. Which begs the question, "What is going oninside the core of a black hole?" The debate and theories continue!! Thanks for watching! Hope you learned something new!! Let me know what your favorite fact was inthe comments! Be sure to subscribe and see you next time!
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