Black Holes Articles

There are two main ways black holes form: direct collapse or a dying star. Just after the moment of creation, energy was spread more or less uniformly through space, but some places were slightly denser than other. As things got jostled around, some of these areas got so dense that they collapsed into a primordial black hole. It’s thought that these probably were the anchors that created the galaxies. When a really really big star starts to finish it’s fuel and sputter out, it’s internal heat can’t keep gravity at bay anymore and as the star collapses in on itself, the core gets so dense it forms a black hole.

Tag Archive for: black holes

gravity collapse

The Oppenheimer-Snyder Model of Gravitational Collapse: An Overview

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Part 1: OverviewPart 2: Mathematical DetailsPart 3: ImplicationsMost people who have spent any time at all studying GR are familiar with the…
Kerr Spacetime

Geodesic Congruences in FRW, Schwarzschild and Kerr Spacetimes

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Introduction The theory of geodesic congruences is extensively covered in many textbooks (see References); what follows in the introduction is a brief…
Gaia search for black holes

Gaia Astrometry: Detecting Gravitational Waves Effectively

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Gravitational waves (GWs) are disturbances in spacetime produced by massive objects moving asymmetrically. Only the most massive and most relativistic…
black holes are not empty

VHE Gamma Rays from Sgr A*: Black Holes and CTA Observations

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Black Hole Key PointsBlack holes (BHs) have a gravitational pull so strong that nothing, not even light, can escape. BHs can be divided into two…
what are the black hole thermodynamics

Black Hole Thermodynamics: Four Laws Explained — Guide

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Overview Black hole thermodynamics is summarized by four laws that closely parallel the laws of ordinary thermodynamics. Below I present each law, the…
killing Fields and Black Holes

Killing Vector Field & Surface Gravity in Kerr BH Explained

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Killing Vector Field The Killing vector field is a vector field on a differentiable manifold that preserves the spacetime metric. In other words, it generates…
Falling in Black Holes

Radial Infall into a Static Mass: Equations & Guide

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From Exploring Black Holes by John Wheeler and Edwin Taylor. The relations below apply to any object falling radially toward a static, spherically symmetric…
SchwarzschildGeometry4

The Schwarzschild Geometry: Physically Reasonable?

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 In the last article, we looked at various counterintuitive features of the Schwarzschild spacetime geometry, as illustrated in the Kruskal-Szekeres…
SchwarzschildGeometry3

The Schwarzschild Geometry: Spacetime Diagrams

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 When we left off in part 2, we were looking at the metric for the Schwarzschild geometry in Kruskal-Szekeres coordinates:$$ ds^2 = \frac{32…
SchwarzschildGeometry2

The Schwarzschild Geometry: Coordinates

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 At the end of part 1, we looked at the form the metric of the Schwarzschild geometry takes in Gullstrand-Painleve coordinates:$$ ds^2…
SchwarzschildGeometry1

The Schwarzschild Geometry: Key Properties

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 Not long after Einstein published his Field Equation, the first exact solution was found by Karl Schwarzschild. This solution is one of the…
blackholeexists

Do Black Holes Really Exist?

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Introduction The purpose of this article is to discuss the title question from several different viewpoints, to show that it isn't as simple as it looks.…
blackholesuniverse

Why the Early Big Bang Universe Didn’t Form a Black Hole

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Why the Big Bang Is Not a Black Hole In the early universe, the matter was gathered together at very high density — so why wasn't it a black hole? Big…
redshiftblackholes

Time Dilation & Redshift of Schwarzschild Black Holes

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Time dilation near a Schwarzschild black hole The following is an overview of the time-dilation and gravitational-redshift effects of a static (Schwarzschild)…
matterphoton

Will All Matter Be Converted to Photons?

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Will all matter be converted into black holes and then photons? No. There is a misconception that a lot of laypeople seem to be picking up recently from…
blackholesforce

An Equation for the Centrifugal Force Reversal Near A Black Hole

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My goal in this article is to derive a simple equation for the proper acceleration of an observer traveling on a circular path around a Schwarzschild black…
supernova

Star Fate: From Nebulae to White Dwarfs and Black Holes

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Star Fate: From Birth to Black Holes Stars form in vast clouds of gas and dust called nebulae. Over time gravity pulls material together until the core…