The Search For Black Holes Both As A Concept And An Understanding Term paper

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The Search for Black Holes: Both As A Concept And An Understanding

For ages people have been determined to explicate on everything. Our

search for explanation rests only when there is a lack of questions. Our skies

hold infinite quandaries, so the quest for answers will, as a result, also be

infinite. Since its inception, Astronomy as a science speculated heavily upon

discovery, and only came to concrete conclusions later with closer inspection.

Aspects of the skies which at one time seemed like reasonable explanations are

now laughed at as egotistical ventures. Time has shown that as better

instrumentation was developed, more accurate understanding was attained. Now it

seems, as we advance on scientific frontiers, the new quest of the heavens is to

find and explain the phenomenom known as a black hole.

The goal of this paper is to explain how the concept of a black hole

came about, and give some insight on how black holes are formed and might be

tracked down in our more technologically advanced future. Gaining an

understanding of a black hole allows for a greater understanding of the concept

of spacetime and maybe give us a grasp of both science fiction and science fact.

Hopefully, all the clarification will come by the close of this essay.

A black hole is probably one of the most misunderstood ideas among

people outside of the astronomical and physical communities. Before an

understanding of how it is formed can take place, a bit of an introduction to

stars is necessary. This will shed light (no pun intended) on the black hole

philosophy.

A star is an enormous fire ball, fueled by a nuclear reaction at its

core which produces massive amounts of heat and pressure. It is formed when two

or more enormous gaseous clouds come together which forms the core, and as an

aftereffect the conversion, due to that impact, of huge amounts of energy from

the two clouds. The clouds come together with a great enough force, that a

nuclear reaction ensues. This type of energy is created by fusion wherein the

atoms are forced together to form a new one. In turn, heat in excess of

millions of degrees farenheit are produced.

This activity goes on for eons until the point at which the nuclear fuel

is exhausted. Here is where things get interesting. For the entire life of the

star, the nuclear reaction at its core produced an enormous outward force.

Interestingly enough, an exactly equal force, namely gravity, was pushing inward

toward the center. The equilibrium of the two forces allowed the star to

maintain its shape and not break away nor collapse.

Eventually, the fuel for the star runs out, and it this point, the

outward force is overpowered by the gravitational force, and the object caves in

on itself. This is a gigantic implosion. Depending on the original and final

mass of the star, several things might occur. A usual result of such an

implosion is a star known as a white dwarf. This star has been pressed together

to form a much more massive object. It is said that a teaspoon of matter off a

white dwarf would weigh 2-4 tons. Upon the first discovery of a white dwarf, a

debate arose as to how far a star can collapse. And in the 1920’s two leading

astrophysicists, Subrahmanyan Chandrasekgar and Sir Arthur Eddington came up

with different conclusions. Chandrasekhar looked at the relations of mass to

radius of the star, and concluded an upper limit beyond which collapse would

result in something called a neutron star. This limit of 1.4 solar masses was

an accurate measurement and in 1983, the Nobel committee recognized his work and

awarded him their prize in Physics. The white dwarf is massive, but not as

massive as the next order of imploded star known as a neutron star. Often as

the nuclear fuel is burned out, the star will begin to shed its matter in an

explosion called a supernovae. When this occurs the star loses an enormous

amount of mass, but that which is left behind, if greater than 1.4 solar masses,

is a densely packed ball of neutrons. This star is so much more massive that a

teaspoon of it’s matter would weigh somewhere in the area of 5 million tons in

earth’s gravity. The magnitude of such a dense body is unimaginable. But even

a neutron star isn’t the extreme when it comes to a star’s collapse. That

brings us to the focus of this paper. It is felt, that when a star is massive

enough, any where in the area of or larger than 3-3.5 solar masses, the collapse

would cause something of a much greater mass. In fact, the mass of this new

object is speculated to be infinite. Such an entity is what we call a black

hole. After a black hole is created, the gravitational force continues to pull

in space debris and all other types of matter in. This continuous addition

makes the hole stronger and more powerful and obviously more massive. The

simplest three dimensional geometry for a black hole is a sphere. This type of

black hole is called a Schwarzschild black hole. Kurt Schwarzschild was a

German astrophysicist who figured out the critical radius for a given mass which

would become a black hole. This calculation showed that at a specific point

matter would collapse to an infinitely dense state. This is known as

singularity. Here too, the pull of gravity is infinitely strong, and space and

time can no longer be thought of in conventional ways. At singularity, the laws

defined by Newton and Einstein no longer hold true, and a "myterious" world of

quantum gravity exists. In the Schwarzschild black hole, the event horizon, or

skin of the black hole, is the boundary beyond which nothing could escape the

gravitational pull.

Most black holes would tend to be in a consistent spinning motion, because of

the original spin of the star. This motion absorbs various matter and spins it

within the ring that is formed around the black hole. This ring is the

singularity. The matter keeps within the Event Horizon until it has spun into

the center where it is concentrated within the core adding to the mass. Such

spinning black holes are known as Kerr Black Holes. Roy P. Kerr, an Australian

mathematician happened upon the solution to the Einstein equations for black

holes with angular momentums. This black hole...

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