Today I’m going talk about black holes. I know very little about black holes, but I’m going to try and do my best for this essay. I’m going to talk about (how we think) black holes form, the “singularity†at the center of black holes, the event horizon, and the size of black holes.
Nobody has actually seen a black hole form. That means anything we know about the formation of black holes is just a theory. The most popular theory for the formation of black holes is that, when a star runs out of fuel, a Supernova explosion takes place, and then the remnants of the star become a black hole. Because we’ve never seen black holes form before, we don’t know for sure, but this is the most popular theory.
The singularity is an unfathomably small point at the center of a black hole. It has the unfathomably large amounts of mass pulled together into an unfathomably small space. We’re talking a mountain being compressed into the space of an atom small. This point is so dense and has so much gravity that it pulls everything toward it. The gravity is so strong that nothing can escape it, not even light itself, hence why black holes are black.
The event horizon is an invisible boundary between the inside and outside of the black hole. Once you pass the event horizon, there is no going back. Because light cannot escape black holes, when something passes through the event horizon into the black hole, it looks like it freezes in time for a moment, before fading away.
There is another phenomenon about black holes that is interesting. Because gravity gets stronger the closer you are to the source, the gravity at the part of a thing closer to the center would be pulled faster, and the thing would get stretched in a phenomenon known as “spaghettification”.
Overall black holes are quite interesting. They are the only thing in our universe (that we know of) that light cannot escape. They are incomprehensibly large, strong, and mysterious.