They are the cheesy of science fiction, the paradox of science, and are likely the key to understanding the universe.
Scientists have been scrambling to learn about the mysterious power of black holes for decades, but so far they have discovered more existence than the answers.
“We know a black hole is so heavy that its gravity creates a separator in the geometry of the universe,” said Priyamvada Natarajan, a theoretical astrophysicist at Yale University.
“A black hole is so concentrated that it causes a little deep puncture in space/time. At the end of the puncture, you have something called singularity, in which all the known laws of nature collapse. Nothing we know at that time exists.”
Understanding science’s understanding of black holes involves mysterious little red dots, the formation of galaxies and the speckling (unpleasant thought experiments are about what happens to an unfortunate person, enough to attract it into a black hole).
First, the good news is: black holes are not about attracting us. They did not stir around the universe to find galaxies, the sun and planets were to swallow.
“They aren’t just sneaking you in dark alleys,” said Lloyd Knox, a professor of physics and astronomy at the University of California, Davis.
But over the past decade, new telescopes and sensors have changed our understanding of the fundamentals of the universe, which have allowed scientists to see more black holes and every stage of life.
“Our understanding of the role played by black holes, that they are an important part of galaxy formation, is new,” Natarajan said.
What are the secrets of the universe revealed here:
The illustration shows a stream of luminescent material from a star as it is swallowed by a supermassive black hole. When a star passes through a distance from a black hole – enough gravity is destroyed by gravity – the stellar material stretches and compresses when it falls into a black hole.
A new type of black hole and a newly proven theory
The initial understanding of how black holes are formed is that when a sun large enough (10 times larger or larger than ours) reaches the end of life, it may explode into a supernova and then rewind back to a black hole. This can collapse to a few miles and become so dense that its gravity is strong enough to have nothing, not even light, and cannot escape. This is called a stellar mass black hole.
But over the past two decades, new types of black holes have been seen, and astronomers have begun to understand how they are formed. They are called “super-large black holes” and are found in the centers of almost every galaxy, billions to billions of times the mass of our sun.
But how do they form?
“The initial idea was to form small black holes and then they grew up,” Natarajan said. “But then there was a time to explain the monsters seen in the early universe. Even if they devoured the stars’ gas, would they have time to get so big? It’s an open question.
In 2017, she believed that when the galactic gas clouds fell directly on her, these supermassive black holes occurred at the beginning of the universe, completely skipping the stellar stage and going directly from gas to a giant black hole with a giant black hole that was just beginning and then able to grow.
“What then guess what? In 2023, the James Webb telescope found these objects,” she said. “This is what scientists rely on to make predictions and think it’s proven.”
This composite image shows two different clusters of galaxies side by side, each with a central black hole surrounded by plaques and filamentous gases. Galaxy clusters (called Perseus and Half-Man values) are two of the seven galaxy clusters observed in part of an international study led by the University of San Diego.
Black holes do not breathe
Because they have such a huge gravity, black holes will swallow star gas and anything else that is too close to them. But it is not an endless process, and it is eventually sucked into it with the entire universe.
People sometimes worry that black holes are these huge vacuum cleaners that attract all the sight. “It’s not like a vortex dragging into it,” Knox said.
Black holes really are like any other concentrated mass, whether it is the sun or the planet. They have their own gravitational attraction, but not infinite.
“If you’re far enough, you feel the force of gravity, just like you feel from the planet,” said Brenna Mockler, a postbrew family member of Carnegie Observer at Carnegie College of Science in Pasadena, California.
This image represents the position of the newly discovered binary star D9, which is a supermassive black hole in the center of our Milky Way. This is the first ever star to be found near a supermass black hole.
If you get stuck in a black hole, you will be “spotted”
All matter can cause space/time tilts or potholes, Natarajan said. A black hole is so heavy that its gravity creates a kind of isolation in the universe’s geometry.
“The bigger the mass, the bigger the potholes,” she said. “At the end of the puncture, you have something called singularity, in which all the known laws of nature collapsed. Nothing we knew at that time existed.”
The location of that puncture wire is not yet known.
“It’s an open question,” Natarayan said. “We think this could be another universe because we don’t know where it can go. But we don’t know.”
So, what if a person falls into a black hole? Astrophysicists have a saying about this – spotting.
“If you fall into a black hole first, the gravity difference between your head and toes will be so strong that you will be stretched out and spotted,” Natarajan said.
Our sun will never become a black hole
Knox said that we don’t worry about our own sunshine becoming a black hole. It’s not big enough.
“Low mass stars burn through hydrogen to make helium, and then they will start burning helium to carbon. Then at some point, it ends up taking it all apart.”
“Our sunlight will eventually expand and wrap and destroy the earth – but that’s in 5 billion years, so you have some time to be ready. But it won’t be a black hole.”
Mystery that still has no answer – “Little Red Dot”
NASA’s super powerful James Webb space telescope started a science mission in 2022, almost instantly picking up something no one can explain so far: small red objects that seem to be abundant in the universe.
These objects are called “little red dots” and have confusing astronomers. They can be very, very dense, highly dense galaxies formed by high stars.
“Otherwise, they might highly absorb supermassive black holes from the early universe,” said Mockler, an incoming professor at Davis.
This article originally appeared in USA Today: What is a black hole? Scientists rush to solve the mystery of the universe
