Question: What does a black hole actually do??

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  1. Hi wolflover99,

    From what I understand about black holes… scientists dont yet fully understand how they work, or if they have a function at all. They form when a big star dies and essentially leaves a huge gap in the universe.

    Edward… oh space expert I am sure you have more stuff to share with us about these mysterious black holes!?

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  2. Hi wolflover99,

    Physicists have a pretty good understanding of black holes: or, at least, a pretty good understanding of what we do and don’t understand about them.

    There are many different kinds of black hole (small/big, spinning/still, etc.) but what they have in common is
    1. A ‘singularity’: a point of infinite density at which the normal laws of physics stop working;
    2. An ‘event horizon’ around the singularity that is sort of the ‘boundary’ of the black hole: to simplify things just a little, anything that goes in past the event horizon will never come out again.

    What a black hole DOES depends on what is around it. It is possible that a black hole is sitting somewhere in the galaxy near nothing else, in which case it doesn’t “do” anything except play with any light that comes nearby. (This is an interesting illustration of the effect: https://www.cfa.harvard.edu/~bmcleod/castle.html )

    If a star is orbiting the black hole, material will be pulled from the star into the black hole, emitting lots of X-rays (and other stuff) in the process as it spirals into the hole. There are also “supermassive black holes” at the centres of many galaxies. These supermassive black holes are a million or more times heavier than the Sun, and if material is falling into them, things become really interesting.

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