First of all, the good news: the black hole is not out to get us. But they have an immeasurable mystery.
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They are the boogies of science fiction, the paradox of science, and perhaps the key to understanding the universe.
Scientists have been rushing for decades to understand the mystical power of black holes, but so far they seem to have found more existential questions than answers.
Priyamvada Natarajan, theoretical astrophysicist at Yale University, knows that black holes are so heavy that their gravity creates a kind of divot in the geometry of the universe.
“Black holes are so concentrated that they have a slightly deeper hole in space/time. At the end of the puncture there is something called singularity that breaks all known laws of nature. There’s nothing we know at that point.”
Understanding what science knows about black holes includes mystical little red dots, galaxy formation, and spaghetification (an uncomfortable thought experiment on what happens to someone who is so unlucky that it’s sucked into a black hole).
First of all, the good news: the black hole is not out to get us. They are not looking for galaxies, suns, or planets that cry and devour them around the universe.
“They don’t just sneak up on you in dark alleys,” said Lloyd Knox, professor of physics and astronomy at the University of California, Davis.
But our understanding of the very basics of the universe has been transformed over the past decade, with new telescopes and sensors, as scientists see more black holes, at every stage of their lives.
“Our understanding of the role black holes play is that they are an important part of the formation of galaxies,” Natarajan said.
What universe’s secrets are revealed here:
New types of black holes and new proven theories
The original understanding of how black holes were formed was that when a large enough sun (about ten times more than ours) reached the end of its life, it could explode onto a supernova. The problem collapses and collapses, only a few miles away, and its gravity is strong enough that it cannot escape even lightly. This is what is called a star mass black hole.
However, over the past 20 years, new types of black holes have been seen, and astronomers are beginning to understand how they are formed. Called Super Massive Black Holes, they are discovered in the centres of almost every galaxy, 100,000 to 1 billion times the mass of our sun.
But how did they form?
“The original idea was that it grew after the small black holes were formed,” Natarajan said. “But there’s a timing crunch that explains the monsters you see in early universes. Did they have time to grow so much, even if they were gobbling star gas? That was an open question 20 years ago.”
In 2017, she theorized that these super-large black holes from the early beginnings of the universe would collapse directly onto themselves, skipping the star stage completely, moving straight from the gas to the giant black hole seeds, growing on the head start.
“And what do you guess? In 2023, James Webb Telescope found these objects,” she said. “This is to make predictions and make sure that it’s proven.”
Black holes don’t suck everything
Because they have such a massive gravity, black holes devour stellar gases and things that get too close to them. But it is not an infinite process in which the entire universe will end up being sucked into them.
People may worry that black holes are these giant vacuum cleaners that depict everything in front of them. “It’s not like the vortex is dragging everything,” Knox said.
Black holes are really similar to other mass concentrations, whether they are the sun or the planet. They have their own gravity pull, but that’s not infinite.
“If you’re far enough away, you just feel gravity and the way you feel it from the planet,” said Brenna Mockler, a post-doctoral fellow at the Carnegie Observatory at the Carnegie Science Facility in Pasadena, California.
If you fall into a black hole, you will be “spaghettoed”
All problems cause space/time dips or potholes, Natarajan said. Black holes are so heavy that their gravity creates a kind of divot in the geometry of the universe.
“The larger the mass, the larger the pothole,” she said. “At the end of the puncture there is something called singularity, in which all known laws of nature break down. There is nothing we know at that point.”
The lead of that punk is unknown.
“That’s an unresolved question,” Natarajan said. “We don’t think it will become another universe because we don’t know where we can go in our universe. But we don’t know.”
So what happens if a human falls into a black hole? Astrophysicists have that phrase – spaghettiization.
“If you first fall into a black hole to your head, the difference in gravity on your head and toes is very intense and you’ll be stretched and spaghettoed,” Natarajan said.
Our Sun will never become a black hole
Knox has no fear that our own sun will become a black hole. It’s not big enough.
“The lower mass star burns hydrogen to create helium and starts burning helium to carbon. And at some point it just pulls itself apart,” he said.
“Our sun will eventually expand and envelop the Earth and destroy it. But it’s five billion years from now, so we have time to prepare. But it won’t become a black hole.”
Unanswered Mystery – “Small Red Dot”
NASA’s extremely powerful James Webb Space Telescope launched its scientific mission in 2022, picking up something no one could explain almost immediately.
These objects, called “little red dots,” are perplexed by astronomers. They can be very dense and highly star-formed galaxies.
“Or maybe they’ll accumulate very significant black holes from very early universes,” said Mockler, the next professor at the University of California, Davis.
