Space Black Holes Essay

A black hole is an area in space that pulls in a huge amount of matter, and the gravitational pull is so great that not even light is able to escape from it. Since light can’t escape a black hole, scientists are not able to physically see a black hole so that is how black holes got the name of black hole. This typically happens when a star is dying and collapses which pulls in matter around the dying star.

Space telescopes with special tools and attachments can help locate a black hole. These special attachments can see how other stars that are really close to the black hole acts, and compares them with other stars that are further out. The first way to detect a black hole is by the gravitational influence that affects the matter around it. For example when scientists look though a telescope at other galaxies they can see the spiral motion of the stars in that galaxy and see where that black hole is located at. The second way is by observing the matter that is falling into the black hole and as matter falls within, matter settles in a disk around the black hole that gets hot and emits light from the black hole that scientists can see. For example the light that emits off of the hot matter is like the picture produced by an x-ray.

Black holes can come in many different sizes depending on the amount of matter it has near itself. The more matter around the bigger and denser it becomes, also if the black hole doesn’t have much matter around it the smaller it is. Scientists believe that there are black holes that are only the size of an atom but it has huge amounts of mass in them. There are other types of black holes out there one is called “stellar” and the largest ones are called “supermassive”. Stellar black holes are black holes whose mass could be twenty times more than our sun in this solar system (Smith, 2008). Supermassive black holes are the black holes that are at the center of a galaxy. “Scientists have found proof that every large galaxy contains a supermassive black hole at its center” (Smith, 2008). This type of black hole has enough mass that is equivalent to or more than one million of our suns put together.

Scientists believe that the smallest black holes were created when the big bang happened. A common black hole is created by a star dying and collapsing in on itself to the point it draws matter into it. For a black hole to form from a dying star, that dying star has to have the mass of our sun twenty times over. “A star with a mass greater than 20 times the mass of our Sun may produce a black hole at the end of its life” (Paula Borinsky Hendry, Greg Helms). In the life of a star