Black holes, the sun and wormholes.

Orl13 · Feb 27, 2007

I've been reading Kip Thorne's book "Black Holes and Time Warps" and was wondering about a couple of things. They're really basic questions that have been floating around in my head, but I can't ask any of my friends because none of them know anything about these topics, so....I came here. Please forgive me if these questions seem rudimentary to you educated folk.

Firstly, do black holes really exist or are they just part of a theory that is likely to be true? I've read alot about black holes and their effects on space and time it's all very fascinating stuff, but I'm wondering if I'm reading about theories or actual existant gateways to oblivion.

Secondly, (this one may seem really stupid and I'm sorry) could our sun potentially become a black hole? I understand that black holes are fromed by a star collapsing on itself, is that the fate of ours? Is our sun considered a star?

Finally, wormholes, a tunnel through space and maybe even time. Do they exist? are they only theoretical? If they are existant then how in the world does one come to the conlucusion that they exist? Was there a physicist who was sitting around one day and thought to himself "man, wormholes would be cool" and developed a theory, or did a physicist stumble onto the exsitence or theoretical exsitence of wormholes.

Just a few questions that have been in the back of my head for awhile and I would appreciate them answered if it's not too much hassle

ziad1985 · Feb 27, 2007

(Someone please correct me if i said something wrong..)
They do exist , The problem is that due to their nature, we can't have a direct evidence of there existence, you can't just point the telescope to a part of space look into one.
We can know they are out there buy looking at indirect evidence , such as gravitational lensing, and stars that appear to be in orbit round a point in space where there is no visible matter, or X-ray emmited from the accretion disk..
I guess there is other way to determine.

There is no fear that our sun could turn into a black hole , it doesn't have enough mass , Stars with mass about 5 and above the sun's mass are what you could expect to become a black hole.

I don't know much of the wormholes thing but I do know this , to use a wormhole you'd need exotic matter(matter that have negative or imaginary mass) to make the wormhole usable..
BTW : Wormholes and black holes are both solution to Einstein field equations, no one was thinking it would be cool , they are solution..

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Black holes, the sun and wormholes.

Orl13

ziad1985