BLACK HOLES – FROM BIRTH TO DEATH

Introduction

Black holes are one of the strangest space anomalies in existence. They don’t make any sense at
all as not even light can escape black holes. So, we perceive them as spheres of darkness.
Where do they come from? And what happens if you fall into one? These questions have
baffled scientists for ages.

Fusion of stars

Stars are incredibly massive collections of mostly hydrogen atoms that collapsed from
enormous gas cloud under their own gravity. In their core, nuclear fusion crushes hydrogen
atoms into helium releasing a tremendous amount of energy. This energy, in the form of
radiation, pushes against gravity, maintaining a delicate balance between the two forces. As
long as there is a fusion in the core, a star remains stable enough. But for stars with way more
mass than our sun the heat and pressure at the core allow them to fuse heavier elements until
they reach iron.

Birth of darkness

Unlike all the elements that went before, the fusion process that creates iron does not generate
any energy. Iron builds up at the center of the star until it reaches a critical amount and the
balance between and radiation and gravity is suddenly broken. The core collapses, within a
fraction of seconds the star implodes. Moving at about the quarter of speed of light, feeding
even more mass into core. It’s at this very moment that all the heavier elements in the universe
are created as the star dies in a supernova explosion.

Event horizon

This produces either a neutron star or if the star is massive enough the entire mass of the core
collapses into a black hole. If we look into a black what we’d actually be seeing is the “Event
Horizon”. Anything that crosses the event horizon needs to travelling faster than speed of light
to escape. So, we just see a black sphere reflecting nothing. But if the event horizon is the black
part then what is the “hole” part of black hole? A singularity.

Singularity

Singularity is an imaginary point in space-time where laws of physics don’t make any sense. Or
it’s the point where star compresses to its maximum. A singularity may be indefinitely dense,
meaning all its mass is concentrated into a single point in space with no surface or volume or
something completely different. By the way, black holes do not suck things up like a vacuum
cleaner. If we were to swap the sun with an equally massive black hole, nothing will change foe
earth. It will continue to rotate around it and also life on earth would cease to exist.

What happens if we fell into a black hole?

The experience of time is different around black holes, from the outside you seem to slow
down as you approaches the event horizon. So, time passes slower for you. At some point, you
would appear to freeze in time, slowly turn red and disappear. While from your perspective you
can watch the rest of the universe in fast forward, kind of like seeing into future. Right now we
don’t know what happens next. But could be one of two things, one, you die a quick death. A
black hole curves space so much that once you cross the event horizon, there is only one
possible direction.

Inside the event horizon, you can only go in one direction. The mass of the black hole is so
concentrated that at some point even tiny distances of few centimeters would mean that
gravity acts with millions of times more force on different part of your body. Cells get torn as
body stretches more and more until you are a hot stream of plasma. Two, you die a very quick
death, very soon after crossing the event horizon, you would hit a firewall and be terminated in
an instant. How soon you would die depends upon the mass of the black hole.

A smaller black hole would kill you before you even enter its event horizon. While you could
probably travel inside a supermassive black hole for quite a while until you reach singularity.
The further away from singularity you are the longer you live.
Types of black holes

Black holes come in three different sizes. There are stellar black holes with a few times the mass
of our sun say 15 times and diameter of an asteroid. There are supermassive black holes with
trillion times the mass of our sun. supermassive black holes are found at the heart of every
galaxy and have been feeding for billions of years. There are primordial black holes (if they
exist) with size of an atom. These black holes formed very soon after the big bang.

Hawking radiation

As powerful the black holes are, they will eventually evaporate through a process called
“Hawking radiation”. In order to understand this, consider an empty space. Empty space is not
empty but filled with virtual particles popping into existence and annihilating each other again.
When this happens right on the edge of the black hole, one of the virtual particles will be drawn
into the black hole. And the other will escape and become a real particle. So, the black hole is
losing energy. This happens incredibly slowly at first and gets faster as the black hole gets
smaller. When it arrives at the mass of a large asteroid, its radiating at room temperature.
When it has mass of a mountain, it radiates with about the heat of our sun. And in the last
second of its life, the black hole radiates away the energy of billions of nuclear bombs in a huge
explosion. But this process is incredibly slow. The biggest black holes we know might take up a
googol year to evaporate, this is so long that when the last black hole radiates away no one
would be around to witness it. The universe would have become inhabitable long before then.

Information paradox

Black holes will become tinier and tinier until they evaporate and disappear, leaving behind just
a bit of radiation. But this is a paradox, because in the process of disappearing black holes might
delete something very fundamental: “information”.
References

1. https://lonewolfonline.net/black-holes
2. https://theuniverseunlimit.blogspot.com/2020/09...
3. https://jameswebbnews.com/2022/06/17/black-holes.