Research page:Black holes

Introductory notes

1. A black hole is an infinitely dense region that contains the mass of millions or billions of Suns and from which no light can escape
2. Probably each elliptical galaxy, the largest in the cosmos, contains a supermassive black hole when about 3.5 billion years old - these are called high-energy quasars
3. The biggest black hole discovered as of 2009 weighs 18 billion suns and is about the size of an entire galaxy
4. The event horizon is the sphere around a black hole within which nothing can escape because all light and info is pulled in and because nothing can go quicker than the speed of light, the event horizon can also be seen as the edge of the universe. The universe looks like a kind of Swiss cheese.
5. 'The properties of time and space are reversed'
6. Celestial bodies can orbit around a black hole as long as they are outside the event horizon. The mass is still there.
7. The heaviest black hole observed in 2008 was 3 billion x sun mass, which is about the mass of an ordinary galaxy = supermassive black holes
8. An ordinary black hole has about the mass of 10 suns
9. Light cannot escape a black hole because it loses energy trying to escape, just like light that moves away from a heavy object loses energy because it red-shifts to lower frequencies of life.
10. It isn't clear where the super-massive black holes at the centers of galaxies came from. They have a mass of billions of suns. It may be that at the beginning of the cosmos there existed super-massive stars whose collapse caused the super-massive black holes.
11. Black holes don't have a surface but neutron stars do. This means that all gas that approaches a black hole gets sucked in and doesn't radiate light while neutron stars emit light when this happens.

See also

• Research page:Cosmos
• Research page:Older cosmos

External links

• Black hole Research topics (John Eagles blog)
• Black hole - more articles general Research topics (John Eagles blog)

News articles

Newest at top

• Gravitational Waves from Dying Black Holes Reveal the Secret of Their Birth The Daily Galaxy - Sept. 17, 2012
• Black Holes: Everything You Think You Know Is Wrong " If most people know one thing about black holes, they probably know that nothing can escape from them, not even light. Yet this most basic tenet about black holes has actually been disproven by the theory of quantum mechanics..." - Space.com - August 2, 2012
• A Supermassive Black Hole Was Ejected Out Of Its Home Galaxy "One of the most fascinating – and potentially terrifying – things about this discovery is that it implies that there may be supermassive black holes moving through the universe outside of galaxies. And we currently have no way of knowing that they’re there." - Forbes - June 5, 2012
• New Model May Show How Black Holes Become Supermassive "Almost every galaxy has an enormously massive black hole in its centre. Our own galaxy, the Milky Way, has one about four million times heavier than the sun. But some galaxies have black holes a thousand times heavier still. We know they grew very quickly after the Big Bang. These hugely massive black holes were already full-grown when the universe was very young, less than a tenth of its present age." - Forbes - March 26, 2012
• The Smallest Known Black Hole Has 20 Million Mile Per Hour Winds - Forbes - Febr. 22, 2012
• A Black Hole Brings New Stars To Life "... researchers have theorized that by pushing out the hot gasses, the outflow from the black hole causes them to compress. That compression then leads to the formation of new stars." - Forbes - Feb. 7, 2012