What are black holes? a.

A black hole is a place in space where gravity pulls so much that even light can not get out. The gravity is so strong because matter has been squeezed into a tiny space. This can happen when a star is dying. How is it formed? a. Most common theory is where a colossal star with a mass of more than 3 times the Suns reaches the end of its life, gets crushed under its own gravity, leaving behind a compact blackhole. Lets see how that intriguing process takes place. When a gigantic star reaches the final stage of its life and is about to go supernova (which normally takes billions of years), it spends all the nuclear fuel by then. So it stops burning and heating up and cannot create the nuclear energy required to feed the star and let it make a pivotal balance to support its own gravitational draw against the intense pressures brewing inside. Therefore its stability cracks under its own gravity. The radius of the star shrinks to a critical size, called the Schwarzschild radius and it starts to devour anything and everything that comes a bit too close, including light. Gravity does its job and the core of the star caves in and implodes. The outer shells of the star explode into the space. They may even fall into the already dense black hole making it even heavier and denser. And thats how you get a stellar mass black hole . What is a singularity? a. A singularity means a point where some property is infinite. For example, at the center of a black hole, according to classical theory, the density is infinite (because a finite mass is compressed to a zero volume). Hence it is a singularity. Similarly, if you extrapolate the properties of the universe to the instant of the Big Bang, you will find that both the density and the temperature go to infinity, and so that also is a singularity. It must be stated that these come due to the breaking down of the classical theory. As yet, there is no

theory of quantum gravity, but it is entirely possible that the singularities may be avoided with a theory of quantum gravity. What does it look like? a. A black hole itself is invisible because no light can escape from it. In fact, when black holes were first hypothesized they were called "invisible stars." If black holes are invisible, how do we know they exist? This is exactly why it is so difficult to find a black hole in space! However, a black hole can be found indirectly by observing its effect on the stars and gas close to it. For example, consider a double-star system in which the stars are very close. If one of the stars explodes as a supernova and creates a black hole, gas and dust from the companion star might be pulled toward the black hole if the companion wanders too close. In that case, the gas and dust are pulled toward the black hole and begin to orbit around the event horizon and then orbit the black hole. The gas becomes heavily compressed and the friction that develops among the atoms converts the kinetic energy of the gas and dust into heat, and x-rays are emitted. Using the radiation coming from the orbiting material, scientists can measure its heat and speed. From the motion and heat of the circulating matter, we can infer the presence of a black hole. The hot matter swirling near the event horizon of a black hole is called an accretion disk. How big are they? a. Black holes can be big or small. Scientists think the smallest black holes are as small as just one atom. These black holes are very tiny but have the mass of a large mountain. Mass is the amount of matter, or "stuff," in an object. Another kind of black hole is called "stellar." Its mass can be up to 20 times more than the mass of the sun. There may be many, many stellar mass black holes in Earth's galaxy. Earth's galaxy is called the Milky Way.

The largest black holes are called "supermassive." These black holes have masses that are more than 1 million suns together. Scientists have found proof that every large galaxy contains a supermassive black hole at its center. The supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy is called Sagittarius A. It has a mass equal to about 4 million suns and would fit inside a very large ball that could hold a few million Earths.

How many types of black holes are there? a. Stellar black hole is is a black hole formed by the gravitational collapse of a massive star.[1] They have masses ranging from about 3 to several tens of solar masses.[2] The process is observed as a supernova explosion[citation needed] or as a gamma ray burst
b. Supermassive black holes likely exist in the centers of most galaxies, including our own galaxy, the Milky Way. They can have a mass equivalent to billions of suns. In the outer parts of galaxies (where our solar system is located within the Milky Way) there are vast distances between stars. However, in the central region of galaxies, stars are packed very closely together. Because everything in the central region is tightly packed to start with, a black hole in the center of a galaxy can become more and more massive as stars orbiting the event horizon can ultimately be captured by gravitational attraction and add their mass to the black hole. By measuring the velocity of stars orbiting close to the center of a galaxy, we can infer the presence of a supermassive black hole and calculate its mass. Perpendicular to the accretion disk of a supermassive black hole, there are sometimes two jets of hot gas. These jets can be millions of light years in length. They are probably caused by the interaction of gas particles with strong, rotating magnetic fields surrounding the black hole. Observations with the Hubble Space

Telescope have provided the best evidence to date that supermassive black holes exist.
c. Miniature black holes have not been precisely identified, but a number of hypotheses have been proposed. The basic idea is that miniature black holes might have been formed shortly after the "Big Bang," which is thought to have started the Universe about 15 billion years ago. Very early in the life of the Universe the rapid expansion of some matter might have compressed slower-moving matter enough to contract into black holes. Some scientists hypothesize that black holes can theoretically "evaporate" and explode. The time required for the "evaporation" would depend upon the mass of the black hole. Very massive black holes would need a time that is longer than the current accepted age of the universe. Only miniature black holes are thought to be capable of evaporation within the existing time of our universe. For a black hole formed at the time of the "Big Bang" to evaporate today its mass must be about 1015g (i.e., about 2 trillion pounds), a little more than twice the mass of the current Homo sapien population on planet Earth. During the final phase of the "evaporation," such a black hole would explode with a force of several trillion times that of our most powerful nuclear weapon. So far, however, there is no observational evidence for miniature black holes.

When was it theorized? a. Using Newton's Laws in the late 1790s, John Michell of England and Pierre LaPlace of France independently suggested the existence of an "invisible star." Michell and LaPlace calculated the mass and size which is now called the "event horizon" that an object needs in order to have an escape velocity greater than the speed of light. In 1967 John Wheeler, an American theoretical physicist, applied the term "black hole" to these collapsed objects.

What evidence do we have for the existence of black holes? a. Astronomers have found convincing evidence for a supermassive black hole in the center of the giant elliptical galaxy M87, as well as in several other galaxies. The discovery is based on velocity measurements of a whirlpool of hot gas orbiting the black hole. In 1994, Hubble Space Telescope data produced an unprecedented measurement of the mass of an unseen object at the center of M87. Based on the kinetic energy of the material whirling about the center (as in Wheeler's dance, see Question 4 above), the object is about 3 billion times the mass of our Sun and appears to be concentrated into a space smaller than our solar system. For many years x-ray emission from the double-star system Cygnus X-1 convinced many astronomers that the system contains a black hole. With more precise measurements available recently, the evidence for a black hole in Cygnus X-1 is very strong. How does the Hubble Space Telescope search for black holes? a. A black hole cannot be viewed directly because light cannot escape it. Effects on the matter that surrounds it infer its presence. Matter swirling around a black hole heats up and emits radiation that can be detected. Around a stellar black hole this matter is composed of gas and dust. Around a supermassive black hole in the center of a galaxy the swirling disk is made of not only gas but also stars. An instrument aboard the Hubble Space Telescope, called the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STIS), was installed in February 1997. STIS is the space telescope's main "black hole hunter." A spectrograph uses prisms or diffraction gratings to split the incoming light into its rainbow pattern. The position and strength of the line in a spectrum gives scientists valuable information. STIS spans ultraviolet, visible, and near-infrared wavelengths. This instrument can take a spectrum of many places at once across the center of a galaxy. Each spectrum tells scientists how fast the stars and gas are swirling at that location. With that information, the central mass that

the stars are orbiting can be calculated. The faster the stars go, the more massive the central object must be. STIS found the signature of a supermassive black hole in the center of the galaxy M84. The spectra showed a rotation velocity of 400 km/s, equivalent to 1.4 million km every hour! The Earth orbits our Sun at 30 km/s. If Earth moved as fast as 400 km/s our year would be only 27 days long! II. How does it affect its environment? a. The Environmental Impact of Supermassive Black Holes The supermassive black holes observed at the centers of almost all present-day galaxies, had a profound impact on their environment. I highlight the principle of self-regulation, by which supermassive black holes grow until they release sufficient energy to unbind the gas that feeds them from their host galaxy. This principle explains several observed facts, including the correlation between the mass of a central black hole and the depth of the gravitational potential well of its host galaxy, and the abundance and clustering properties of bright quasars in the redshift interval of z~2-6. At lower redshifts, quasars might have limited the maximum mass of galaxies through the suppression of cooling flows in X-ray clusters. The seeds of supermassive black holes were likely planted in dwarf galaxies at redshifts z>10, through the collapse of massive or supermassive stars. The minimum seed mass can be identified observationally through the detection of gravitational waves from black hole binaries by Advanced LIGO or LISA. Aside from shaping their host galaxies, quasar outflows filled the intergalactic medium with magnetic fields and heavy elements. Beyond the reach of these outflows, the brightest quasars at z>6 have ionized exceedingly large volumes of gas (tens of comoving Mpc) prior to global reionization, and must have suppressed the faint end of the galaxy luminosity function in these volumes before the same occurred through the rest of the universe.

Example (s)
b.

If the sun was suddenly replaced by a black hole, would the Earth get sucked in? a. But contrary to popular myth, a black hole is not a cosmic vacuum cleaner. If our Sun was suddenly replaced with a black hole of the same mass, Earth's orbit around the Sun would be unchanged. Of course, Earth's temperature would change, and there would be no solar wind or solar magnetic storms affecting us. To be "sucked" into a black hole, one has to cross inside the Schwarzschild radius. At this radius, the escape speed is equal to the speed of light, and once light passes through, even it cannot escape. The Schwarzschild radius can be calculated using the equation for escape speed: vesc = (2GM/R)1/2 For photons, or objects with no mass, we can substitute c (the speed of light) for Vesc and find the Schwarzschild radius, R, to be R = 2GM/c2 If the Sun was replaced with a black hole that had the same mass as the Sun, the Schwarzschild radius would be 3 km (compared to the Sun's radius of nearly 700,000 km). Hence the Earth would have to get very close to get sucked into a black hole at the center of our Solar System. How do black holes affect time and space? a. A spinning black hole in the constellation Scorpius has created a stable dent in the fabric of spacetime, scientists say. The dent is the sort of thing predicted by Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity. It affects the movement of matter falling into the black hole.

The spacetime-dent is invisible, but scientists deduced its existence after detecting two X-ray frequencies from the black hole that were identical to emissions noted nine years ago. The finding will allow scientists to calculate the black hole's spin, a crucial measurement necessary for describing the object's behavior. b. While devising his general theory of relativity, Einstein combined the three dimensions of space and the one dimension of time into a single useful concept he called spacetime. Spacetime can be thought of as an elastic sheet that bends under the weight of objects placed upon it. The more massive the object, the more spacetime bends. If the massive object is also spinning, it causes spacetime to not only bend but to twist as well. Scientists call this effect "frame dragging." Twisted spacetime will cause gas falling into a black hole to move in certain ways. The phenomenon can be roughly compared to the movement of a needle on a record player: as the needle moves along an etched groove on a record, it produces a sound, the exact nature of which is determined by physical deformations in the groove itself. Similarly, the black hole has created stable deformations in the fabric of spacetime that affects matter moving around it. Gas swirling around the black hole acts like the record needle, but instead of producing specific sounds, it produces certain frequencies of X-ray light. What is inside a black hole? a. A physicist presents a solution to present-day cosmic mysteries.

But an Indiana University professor has a new theory, reports New Scientist: Were inside a black hole that exists

in another universe. Specifically, a black hole that rebounded, somewhat like a spring.
Our universe may exist inside a black hole. This may sound strange, but it could actually be the best explanation of how the universe began, and what we observe today. It's a theory that has been explored over the past few decades by a small group of physicists including myself. Successful as it is, there are notable unsolved questions with the standard big bang theory, which suggests that the universe began as a seemingly impossible "singularity," an infinitely small point containing an infinitely high concentration of matter, expanding in size to what we observe today. The theory of inflation, a super-fast expansion of space proposed in recent decades, fills in many important details, such as why slight lumps in the concentration of matter in the early universe coalesced into large celestial bodies such as galaxies and clusters of galaxies. But these theories leave major questions unresolved. For example: What started the big bang? What caused inflation to end? What is the source of the mysterious dark energy that is apparently causing the universe to speed up its expansion? The idea that our universe is entirely contained within a black hole provides answers to these problems and many more. It eliminates the notion of physically impossible singularities in our universe. And it draws upon two central theories in physics. The first is general relativity, the modern theory of gravity. It describes the universe at the largest scales. Any event in the universe occurs as a point in space and time, or spacetime. A massive object such as the Sun distorts or "curves" spacetime, like a bowling ball sitting on a canvas. The Sun's gravitational dent alters the motion of Earth and the other planets orbiting it. The sun's pull of the planets appears to us as the force of gravity.

The second is quantum mechanics, which describes the universe at the smallest scales, such as the level of the atom. However, quantum mechanics and general relativity are currently separate theories; physicists have been striving to combine the two successfully into a single theory of "quantum gravity" to adequately describe important phenomena, including the behavior of subatomic particles in black holes. A 1960s adaptation of general relativity, called the Einstein-CartanSciama-Kibble theory of gravity, takes into account effects from quantum mechanics. It not only provides a step towards quantum gravity but also leads to an alternative picture of the universe. This variation of general relativity incorporates an important quantum property known as spin. Particles such as atoms and electrons possess spin, or the internal angular momentum that is analogous to a skater spinning on ice. In this picture, spins in particles interact with spacetime and endow it with a property called "torsion." To understand torsion, imagine spacetime not as a two-dimensional canvas, but as a flexible, onedimensional rod. Bending the rod corresponds to curving spacetime, and twisting the rod corresponds to spacetime torsion. If a rod is thin, you can bend it, but it's hard to see if it's twisted or not. Spacetime torsion would only be significant, let alone noticeable, in the early universe or in black holes. In these extreme environments, spacetime torsion would manifest itself as a repulsive force that counters the attractive gravitational force coming from spacetime curvature. As in the standard version of general relativity, very massive stars end up collapsing into black holes: regions of space from which nothing, not even light, can escape. Here is how torsion would play out in the beginning moments of our universe. Initially, the gravitational attraction from curved space would overcome torsion's repulsive forces, serving to collapse matter into smaller regions of space. But eventually torsion would become

very strong and prevent matter from compressing into a point of infinite density; matter would reach a state of extremely large but finite density. As energy can be converted into mass, the immensely high gravitational energy in this extremely dense state would cause an intense production of particles, greatly increasing the mass inside the black hole. The increasing numbers of particles with spin would result in higher levels of spacetime torsion. The repulsive torsion would stop the collapse and would create a "big bounce" like a compressed beach ball that snaps outward. The rapid recoil after such a big bounce could be what has led to our expanding universe. The result of this recoil matches observations of the universe's shape, geometry, and distribution of mass. In turn, the torsion mechanism suggests an astonishing scenario: every black hole would produce a new, baby universe inside. If that is true, then the first matter in our universe came from somewhere else. So our own universe could be the interior of a black hole existing in another universe. Just as we cannot see what is going on inside black holes in the cosmos, any observers in the parent universe could not see what is going on in ours. The motion of matter through the black hole's boundary, called an "event horizon," would only happen in one direction, providing a direction of time that we perceive as moving forward. The arrow of time in our universe would therefore be inherited, through torsion, from the parent universe. Torsion could also explain the observed imbalance between matter and antimatter in the universe. Because of torsion, matter would decay into familiar electrons and quarks, and antimatter would decay into "dark matter," a mysterious invisible form of matter that appears to account for a majority of matter in the universe.

Finally, torsion could be the source of "dark energy," a mysterious form of energy that permeates all of space and increases the rate of expansion of the universe. Geometry with torsion naturally produces a "cosmological constant," a sort of added-on outward force which is the simplest way to explain dark energy. Thus, the observed accelerating expansion of the universe may end up being the strongest evidence for torsion. Torsion therefore provides a theoretical foundation for a scenario in which the interior of every black hole becomes a new universe. It also appears as a remedy to several major problems of current theory of gravity and cosmology. Physicists still need to combine the Einstein-Cartan-Sciama-Kibble theory fully with quantum mechanics into a quantum theory of gravity. While resolving some major questions, it raises new ones of its own. For example, what do we know about the parent universe and the black hole inside which our own universe resides? How many layers of parent universes would we have? How can we test that our universe lives in a black hole? The last question can potentially be investigated: since all stars and thus black holes rotate, our universe would have inherited the parent black holes axis of rotation as a "preferred direction." There is some recently reported evidence from surveys of over 15,000 galaxies that in one hemisphere of the universe more spiral galaxies are "lefthanded", or rotating clockwise, while in the other hemisphere more are "right-handed", or rotating counterclockwise. In any case, I believe that including torsion in geometry of spacetime is a right step towards a successful theory of cosmology.