Have you ever wanted to know what is beyond the sky we see? well this is the page for you. It contains fascinating facts and pictures of the far reaches of the universe ranging from black holes to giant star explosions! A different topic each month for you to read and become a genius to impress people.

 


BLACK HOLES

We are led to believe that from the dawn of time itself, matter and energy have been constantly taken out of the universe. These theories and scientific evidence have led to the conclusion that black holes exist in our universe today.

Black holes started life as a normal star, going about its normal routine of fusing oxygen into helium in its core. That with the mass of the star being ten times that of our sun will create enough outward pressure to stop the stars own gravity from collapsing it in towards the center. When the oxygen runs out and the fusion reaction stops, the outward pressure becomes far less than the stars own gravitational pull and so would begin to collapse inwards.

The collapsing of the star would mean that the mass of the star would be crushed further and further into a smaller and smaller space creating a huge density. As the density increased so would the size of the gravity of the collapsing star and so the escape velocity would increase. The escape velocity is the speed at which an object needs to travel to escape the stars gravitational pull and be free of the stars influence.

Once the star had collapsed so much that the gravitational pull was so great due a high density, the escape velocity will be so high that nothing can escape the stars gravitational pull towards it, including light so everything that goes near it gets sucked in. As light cannot escape it then it appears black, hence the black hole.

An object travelling towards a black hole will be fine until it reaches the event horizon, the point of no return and the point at which the gravitational pull of the black hole grabs you and pulls you in with no escape. The change in gravity through the black hole will tear the object to shreads before crushing the shreads into an infinitley small and infinitley dense point, called a singularity.

Above is an x-ray photograph of a black hole. Black holes give out x-rays due to all the matter going into it and we can detect it and turn it into a visible photograph.

Next month I will follow up this topic and teach you all about what happens to the matter and where it goes after the crushing, by talking about WORM HOLES and BABY UNIVERSES.

 

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