Table of Contents
What is the point of a black hole at which no light can escape?
Within the event horizon of a black hole space is curved to the point where all paths that light might take to exit the event horizon point back inside the event horizon. This is the reason why light cannot escape a black hole.
What would you see if you looked at a black hole?
At the center of the black hole, you could see the “singularity”, a point where extremely large amounts of matter are packed and crushed into a small amount of space (1 dimensional). But no one can be sure whether the singularity exists or not as we can’t see the black hole because light cannot escape from it.
How do we know there is a black hole at the center of our galaxy?
Most stellar black holes, however, are very difficult to detect. Astronomers believe that supermassive black holes lie at the center of virtually all large galaxies, even our own Milky Way. Astronomers can detect them by watching for their effects on nearby stars and gas.
What happens inside a black hole event horizon?
The event horizon is where the escape speed exceeds the speed of light: you’d have to be going faster than light (which is impossible for any bit of matter) to escape the black hole’s gravity. Inside the event horizon is where physics goes crazy.
What are the properties of a black hole?
The only properties a black hole exhibits to the wider cosmos are its mass and how fast it’s rotating. This result is puckishly known as the “no-hair theorem”: Whatever is going on in the interior, no “hair” sticks out of the event horizon.
How can an object escape a black hole?
Outside the horizon, an object can escape the black hole’s gravitational pull if it’s moving sufficiently fast; inside, it would need to move faster than light-speed, something forbidden by the laws of nature. In a meaningful sense, a black hole is its event horizon, since we can’t observe anything inside it by any method.
What happens if you fall into a stellar-mass black hole?
If it were a stellar-mass black hole, you’d be dead before you passed the event horizon. That’s because, if you think of a black hole as a pit, a stellar-mass black hole has steeper sides than a supermassive black hole.