Big Bang Essay, Research Paper

Our universe is a vast abyss, always expanding without bound. Many objects in space are

exciting and intriguing. Mysterious surround many findings and cosmologists,

astrophysicists, and astronomers work to obtain a better understanding of these strange

phenomena. One great mystery is that of the black hole, which since the early 1960?s has

been the object of many scientists? work, but has been dated to be the topic of discussion

since 1783, when a astronomer named John Michell first recorded his findings. Questions

still surround these holes such as; What are black holes, how are they formed, and how

do cosmologists find them? (These answers can be found throughout the paper.)

?Since 1960 the universe has taken on a wholly new face. It has become more

exciting, more mysterious, more violent, and more extreme as our knowledge concerning

it has suddenly expanded. And the most exciting, most mysterious, most violent, and most

extreme phenomena of all has the simplest, plainest, calmest, and mildest name – nothing

more than a black hole.? – Isaac Asimov, The Collapsing Universe, 1977 (Pickover X)

The word black hole suggests a ?bottomless pit? so to speak. However a black

hole is not known to be bottomless. However no one knows what happens if one were to

be thrown into a black hole. Two outcomes are likely. On one hand you could be thrown

into a different galaxy with different planets and find other known life. Unfortunately on

the other hand most think you would be ?turned into matter much like spaghetti? by the

force of a black hole. (Sagan 127) Black holes are defined as stars who collapse upon

themselves, creating a mass so dense that light cannot escape it. This leads to the term

black hole, coined by John Wheeler in 1967. Light, the fastest moving thing in our

universe cannot overcome the escape velocity needed to escape a black hole. The escape

velocity refers to the speed needed to get out of the object?s gravity. For example the

earth?s escape velocity is about 7 miles per second. The escape velocity of the sun is

approximately 100 miles per second. Light has a much greater escape velocity of about

186000 miles per second.

The dynamics of a black hole are like that of a spiral, without any color. When

light approaches a black hole is it bent towards it, and eventually sucked up inside of it.

When light approaches a planet with gravity, such as the earth, light is bend towards that

planet. This was first proposed by Einstien, he states that where we see a star in the sky is

not that star?s position is space. Its light is bent by gravity (see fig. 1). This is also true for

black holes but instead or curving, light is trapped into its strong gravitational pull, which

was stated above.

Fig. 1 The curvature of light (Hehl, Puntigam, Ruds)

To understand a black hole you must understand that space is curved, not flat like

a piece of paper. The best example of this is one of those objects in which you insert

coins and they spin until the bottom lets out. The coin you put in is like a planet or a star,

except it does not go round and round until it is gone. The planet stays in a elliptical orbit

because gravity allows it to stay that way. Gravity is the essential part of the universe, and

it allows for planets, stars, and even black holes to exist. Black holes are like an

indentation is space. Another good example is like putting a marble on a piece of soft

rubber, where rubber is space and the marble is the black hole. It makes a circular pit

downward and objects traveling towards it would land inside of it. Similarly to a black

hole, objects do fall into the orbit of a black hole, but they do not stay that way. Instead

the object will be sucked into the hole forever. Many stellar regions act like this, such as

a neutron star or a white dwarf. These can be thought of as not quite black holes. Black

holes collapse all the way until nothing is left, while these collapse into neutrons or dense

stars. Light is not trapped in neutron stars or white dwarves, but black holes capture light.

Black holes are formed by exhausted stars which have no energy left to support itself

against its own gravity. Stars generate heat by converting oxygen into helium. Once the

star is unable to produce helium, its energy is wore out and its own gravity crushes the

star. A black hole is created by a massive star, not just a regular one. Regular size stars

create the neutron stars and white dwarves mentioned before. Once the massive star

collapses under its own gravity, a black hole is the result. (Thorne 164) Additional black

holes are created by the collapse of highly compressed regions in the hot, dense abyss

that existed after the big bang.

The black holes are made up of 2 major things, the event horizon and the

singularity. The event horizon is the circumference of the black hole, and the singularity

is the center, where all the mass is concentrated. If you were to dissect a black hole it

would consist of nothing but the event horizon and the singularity.

Fig.2 Too close to a black hole. (Nemiroff 1)

The event horizon acts as a ?one way membrane? which prohibits anything to escape,

such as ?unwary astronauts who falls into a black hole?. (Hawking 89) There is nothing

else left to see because its own gravity has crushed and distorted everything.

Black holes are weighed by solar masses and they are measured by length by

something called the Schwarzschild radius. This radius is calculated using a formula with

Newton?s gravitational constant, the mass of the black hole, and the speed of light. Solar

masses are just what they sound like, we weigh a planetary object according to how many

suns it would take to equal that mass. As an example, a 10 solar mass black hole would

have the mass to 10 suns. To get the idea of a black hole we use examples to our

knowledge, such as, a 10 solar mass black hole has the gravity at its event horizon 150

billion times that of earth. (Kaufmann 98) At its singularity its gravity is infinite.

Black holes are described by their characteristics, much like volcanoes.

Volcanoes are dormant, active, or sleeping. Black holes are either static or non static,

charged and noncharged. Their names are given to them by these characteristics. Here are

the classifications of the types of black holes:

Schwarzschild black hole- static, noncharged

Reissner-Nordstrom black hole – static, charged

Kerr black hole – nonstatic, noncharged

Kerr-Newman black hole – nonstatic, charged

(Jastrow 52)

Black holes are all different, but they are all classified into groups listed above.

As one is reading they may ask if black holes have omit no light than how do we

know they exist? The truth of the matter is that scientists did not know they existed until

he 1960?s. Even then it was hard to find them. The way they located black holes was by

using technology which determined the location of x-rays. (Luminet 3)Black holes omit

x-rays which are picked up by satellites or space probes. When a region is found to have

extensive x-ray activity, that region is studied further to determine if a black hole is

located there. The astrophysicists must also rely on luck, for some satellites are sucked

up forever into o a black hole. No one has ever really seen a black hole, but the evidence

suggests that they exist in these high x-ray fields.

The paragraph above seems to have contradicted the fact that nothing, not even

light, can escape a black hole. The fact that x-rays are omitted is a paradox. Scientists

have learned that particles at a given time can actually have a greater velocity than the

speed of light. Nothing is faster than the speed of light, however sometimes particles of

matter can exceed the speed of light. (Halpern 97) This is true because of the uncertainty

principle. This principle states that particles cannot have a well defined position and a

well defined velocity. (2 Hawking 62) Now if particles of radiation have a well defined

position (inside a black hole) than their velocity cannot be defined clearly, so the result is

that these particles can, at times, have a greater velocity than the speed of light.

Astrophysicists have come a long way in describing our universe, and black holes

play an important role. In the center of our universe a super massive black hole which ?is

way beyond man?s wildest dreams? is thought to exist. (Berman 77) It has a solar mass

one hundred thousand times that of our sun. Scientists have named this hole Cygnus X-1,

along with 2 neighboring galaxies of black holes called the Magellanic Clouds. (Wheeler

233) These black holes have played a huge role in the formation of our universe.

Scientists have made many discoveries concerning black holes. Much progresshas been made since 1960 and it continues to be the mystery of choice for manycosmologists. Many questions still surround our universe and people have dedicated theirwhole lives to search for the mystery. Old astronomers such as Johannes Kepler and Isaac

Newton, to modern day geniuses like Stephen Hawking and Carl Sagan have learned much about our universe, but their findings are the tip of an iceberg to all the information

that can be obtained through years of study.