"A black hole is a region of spacetime where gravity is so strong that nothing, including light or other electromagnetic waves, has enough energy to escape it."
A region in space where the gravitational pull is so strong that nothing can escape it, including light.
Special theory of relativity: It deals with the behavior of objects moving at a constant speed with respect to an observer and their relationship to space and time.
General theory of relativity: It is a theory that describes the behavior of gravity and the curvature of spacetime caused by massive objects.
Singularity: It is a hypothetical point in space-time where the gravitational field of a black hole is so strong that it causes an infinite curvature of space and time.
Event Horizon: It is a boundary beyond which nothing can escape the gravitational pull of a black hole.
Hawking Radiation: It is a process through which black holes lose energy and eventually evaporate due to the emission of particles.
Wormholes: They are hypothetical tunnels in space-time that connect two or more distant points.
Gravitational Waves: They are ripples in the curvature of spacetime that propagate at the speed of light, caused by the movement of massive objects.
Accretion Disks: They are disks of gas and dust that surround a black hole and heat up due to the friction caused by the immense gravitational forces.
Black Hole Paradoxes: These are thought experiments that explore the logical contradictions arising from the behavior of black holes, such as the information paradox.
Supermassive Black Holes: They are black holes with masses equal to or exceeding billions of times that of the sun that are found at the centers of most galaxies.
Stellar black holes: These are the most common type of black holes and are formed by the collapse of massive stars. They have a mass range of between 3 and 20 times that of the sun.
Intermediate black holes: These black holes are the missing link between the smaller stellar and the larger supermassive black holes. Their mass range is between 100 and 10,000 times that of the sun.
Supermassive black holes: These are the largest type of black holes, with masses ranging from hundreds of thousands to billions of times that of the sun. They are typically found at the center of galaxies, including our own Milky Way.
Miniature black holes: These are theoretical black holes that may have formed during the early universe when extreme conditions existed. They may have a mass range from a few grams to several tons.
Primordial black holes: These are also theoretical black holes that may have formed in the early universe and are believed to have a mass range of between 10^-18 and 10^5 times that of the sun.
Naked black holes: These are black holes without an event horizon, which means they are not hidden from view. These are purely theoretical and would require a violation of the laws of physics as currently understood to exist.
Charged black holes: These are black holes that carry a net electric charge. They are also theoretical, as it is currently believed that black holes should have a neutral charge due to the properties of the matter that forms them.
Spinning black holes: Also known as Kerr black holes, these black holes have a rotation or spin, which creates a dragging effect on spacetime.
Quantum black holes: These are theoretical black holes that incorporate quantum principles and may challenge the classical understanding of black holes.
"The theory of general relativity predicts that a sufficiently compact mass can deform spacetime to form a black hole."
"The boundary of no escape is called the event horizon."
"It has no locally detectable features according to general relativity."
"A black hole acts like an ideal black body, as it reflects no light."
"Quantum field theory in curved spacetime predicts that event horizons emit Hawking radiation, with the same spectrum as a black body of a temperature inversely proportional to its mass."
"This temperature is of the order of billionths of a kelvin for stellar black holes, making it essentially impossible to observe directly."
"Objects whose gravitational fields are too strong for light to escape were first considered in the 18th century by John Michell and Pierre-Simon Laplace."
"Karl Schwarzschild found the first modern solution of general relativity that would characterize a black hole."
"David Finkelstein, in 1958, first published the interpretation of 'black hole' as a region of space from which nothing can escape."
"The discovery of neutron stars by Jocelyn Bell Burnell in 1967 sparked interest in gravitationally collapsed compact objects as a possible astrophysical reality."
"The first black hole known was Cygnus X-1, identified by several researchers independently in 1971."
"Black holes of stellar mass form when massive stars collapse at the end of their life cycle."
"Supermassive black holes of millions of solar masses may form by absorbing other stars and merging with other black holes."
"There is consensus that supermassive black holes exist in the centres of most galaxies."
"The presence of a black hole can be inferred through its interaction with other matter and with electromagnetic radiation such as visible light."
"Any matter that falls onto a black hole can form an external accretion disk heated by friction, forming quasars, some of the brightest objects in the universe."
"If other stars are orbiting a black hole, their orbits can be used to determine the black hole's mass and location."
"Such observations can be used to exclude possible alternatives such as neutron stars. In this way, astronomers have identified numerous stellar black hole candidates in binary systems."
"The radio source known as Sagittarius A*, at the core of the Milky Way galaxy, contains a supermassive black hole of about 4.3 million solar masses."