Black holes can be hard to understand. Or mistaken for something bad.
What are they? They are fascinating objects in space, places where matter has been crunched down into a small area. Earth would be under an inch across if it were crushed into a black hole. The object would contain the entire mass of our planet.
The result? Not even light can escape from a place with a strong pull. Things with more mass have stronger pulls.
This can make black holes seem like terrifying objects, with an appetite for stars and planets. This is not so. They are not menaces in the universe. Following the first image ever taken of a black hole, we tend to exaggerate these things. Black holes are not evil, mean, or scary. They are.
Sagittarius A*, the black hole at the center of our universe, is one of the most common myths about black holes. An unprecedented image of this giant was captured by Astronomers.
A NASA illustration showing the superhot accretion disk around a black hole. Also shown is a jet of eneregy released from matter outside the black hole. Credit: NASA
There is no way to escape from a black hole. It would have to travel from Earth to the moon in less than a second. That might make it seem like black holes have a lot of power. That is not the case.
There is nothing special about the gravity of a black hole, according to Douglas Gobeille, an astrophysicist and black hole researcher at the University of Rhode Island.
If the sun were replaced with a black hole of the same mass, most planets would continue their motion around the Sun just as they are now, with only the closest planets noticing some tidal forces from the black hole. If Earth were replaced with a black hole of the same mass, the moon's path wouldn't change much. The mass around them remains the same.
The situation changes when something ventures near a black hole, it is relative and depends on the size of the black hole. Black holes are unique in how close they can get to a large object. If you were to visit the surface of the sun, you wouldn't be near an object with a black hole. It could be 100 million miles away for a supermassive black hole, which is millions to billions of times larger than the sun.
Gobeille said that you would feel exceptional gravity if you moved close to a black hole.
The first image of Sagittarius A*, the black hole at the center of our galaxy. Credit: Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration
Black holes can exert a powerful pull on objects passing by, but it doesn't mean they are out there.
Some people think that they are Hoovers in the sky, according to Jean Creighton, an astronomer and the director of the Manfred Olson Planetarium at the University of Wisconsin.
A black hole can pull matter or light close by. Only a small amount of this stuff falls into a black hole and is never to be seen again.
Black holes are bad at eating food. Gobeille said they are notoriously picky eaters.
Black holes are terrible at eating things.
Things get intense when matter is close to a black hole. Stars are stretched apart by the force of gravity. The material is collected in a ring, called an accretion disk, where it is superheated to millions of degrees. Astronomers were able to see the first-ever black hole with the help of a hot accretion disk. The fast, rotating disk's natural motion expels material when it spirals into the black hole.
Gobeille explained that it is hard for black holes to feed in an efficient manner. NASA notes that only a small percentage of the material pulled around the black hole Sagittarius A* actually falls in.
When something falls into a black hole, the event horizon is the last point. He explained that a person could still use a flashlight outside the event horizon. The light cannot escape back into the universe once they cross over.
"Most black holes are sitting there quietly."
The majority of black holes are not eating anything. They are not seeking anything out, or sucking anything in. Black holes occupy smaller spaces than the galaxies. Things have to move by.
Most black holes are sitting quietly.
Black holes have a lot of matter. They have a shape. Black holes interact with other matter. They are often classified as objects, though strange ones.
Dominic Pesce, an astronomer at the Center for Astrophysics-Harvard and Smithsonian who studies black holes, told Mashable that it's appropriate to label a black hole as an object or something. He noted that others might choose to describe them as a region.
If someone insists black holes are indeed, they still have a reasonable argument.
I think there is a case to be made for black holes being referred to as "holes" in the observable Universe, in the sense that they enclose a region of spacetime about which external observers cannot glean any information.
An artist's concepton of a black hole. Energy is released outside the black hole as hot matter spirals around in a disk. Credit: XMM-Newton / ESA / NASA
Black holes are not vacuum cleaners with unnatural powers. It is definitely true that they are deeply eerie. Black holes' insides remain mysterious.
The astronomer explained that they don't have a way of probing the inside of a black hole. There is a realm where space and time are thought to break down.
Things interact with black holes outside of their event horizon. When a black hole shreds apart or consumes a star, the hole's swirling disk of superheated material can glow. At times, these invisible objects can be heard. The astronomer who recently imaged the black hole in the center of our galaxy uses specialized telescopes and radio antennas to detect the energy which reveals their activity or existence.
In the years to come, these giant instruments will reveal more secrets about the black holes in our universe and capture more amazing images. We would be in the dark without them.
Gobeille said that what humans can see and hear in the universe is almost nothing.
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