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How do black holes work?

Updated: 8/11/2023
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8y ago

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The intense gravitation of a black hole is strong enough to bend the space and time in it's vicinity. This intense gravitation causes a sort of a funnel effect in that space time which causes objects to be gravitationally attracted to it. It is believed that the atoms of matter entering the black hole are scrunched down to the smallest possible area. The more matter that falls into the black hole the more massive it becomes and the stronger it's gravitaional field. Black holes suck anything near it.

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8y ago
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15y ago

Well if you mean work as in what they do, they basically just keep raoming throughout the universe and eat up planets, stars and the really big ones can eat up whole galaxies! So anyway they roam the universe and eat things up, but they have such an emense gravitational pull that not even the fastest object in space can escape its power..... light!

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14y ago

well basically a black hole is a super massive object, and matter with that much mass attracts other matter but what makes a black hole so special is that the gravity produced by such a super massive object is so high that it even light cannot escape its pull

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9y ago

The mechanism by which black holes can emit energy (and thus, per matter-energy equivalence, decrease in mass) was proposed famously by Stephen Hawking who realized black holes would interact thermodynamically with the universe and have a finite entropy and temperature. The model supports more than one interpretation, a common one is that quantum fluctuations at the subatomic level are boosted by gravity such that virtual particles can become real; the particles are produced in pairs and an antiparticle gets absorbed back into the black hole while its counterpart symmetrically radiates the opposite direction, this being known as Hawking radiation. This type of radiation was calculated to be quite weak, but eventually if the black hole is not further fed by infalling matter it could potentially "evaporate" entirely - with a rate of radiation increasing as the size decreases. Another interpretation is a mechanism which describes a particle just inside the event horizon using quantum tunneling to emerge on the other side, and thus emit energy.

One might wonder how it's possible anything can escape a black hole, especially when the escape velocity is the speed of light at the event horizon and as such, nothing should be able to escape. One question might be, how can the influence of mass be felt if gravity "propagates" and as such, must travel no faster than light and would be "hidden" behind the event horizon? One interpretation is in General Relativity, which is Einstein's theory of gravity, and proposes that gravity is part of space and can influence space (stretching it similar to how a mass might stretch a rubber sheet it was placed on). This would explain how the mass of a black hole can be felt "through" the event horizon. Another interpretation involves experimental determination of the speed at which gravity propagates which is often taken as infinite (or instantaneous) and thus is counter-intuitive to Relativity's notional universal speed limit (speed of light, c) - but which can be shown to be finite and significantly larger than c (see, Speed of Gravity, What the Experiments Say).

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13y ago

Although the exact mechanism has yet to be explained, gravity is a function of mass, so the gravity of an object is dependent on how massive it is. Since a black hole is the most massive object known in the universe, it also has the highest gravity known.

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10y ago

For more details, do some reading about "Hawking radiation"; for example, in the Wikipedia. The basic idea, as far as I understand it, is that virtual particle-antiparticle pairs are spontaneously generated everywhere in space. When this happens near the border of a black hole (just outside the event horizon), it may happen that one of those can escape (becoming a "real" particle), while one falls into the black hole. Strangely enough, the one falling into the black hole is supposed to have a negative mass/energy in this case.

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14y ago

black holes are the result of the death of a massive star; when the star uses up its fuel it collapses in on itself and a black hole is what is left

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15y ago

Black holes release energy in the form of x rays as tidal forces rip and shred infalling matter.

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13y ago

Same as any other object.

Same as any other object.

Same as any other object.

Same as any other object.

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13y ago

Same as any other object.

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