The Mysterious Black Hole

A simulation of a black hole, picture from popsci

The black hole is one of the most amazing and mysterious object in our universe. In 1916, Karl Schwarzschild first provided the solution to general relativity that characterize a black hole.

Black hole is the remnant of super massive star’s explosion, and it has such a strong gravitational pull that nothing can escape, not even particles and light (electromagnetic radiation). And this is why it gets the name “black hole”.

The model of black hole is supported by the theory of general relativity that a super massive object can deform the space-time to form a black hole and the boundary that nothing can escape is called event horizon. The movie “Interstellar” has a very famous part about the horizon event and falling into blackhole.

View of black hole in “Interstellar”, picture from YouTube

The black hole has three independent properties: mass, charge and angular momentum. The center of black hole, according to general relativity, is the singularity where the curvature of space-time is infinite.

Another interesting thing about black hole is called gravitational time dilation. It’s describing that if something is falling into black hole, as it’s closer to event horizon, the time will be slower according to general relativity. And it will take infinite amount of time to reach event horizon.

On February 11th 2016, LIGO announced the first detection of gravitational waves, which also represent the first observation of black hole merging.

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