Exploring the Enigma of Black Holes | National Geographic
Delve into the mysterious world of black holes, where gravity reigns supreme, light cannot escape, and the laws of physics cease to exist. Learn about the event horizon and singularity that make these cosmic objects among the most captivating in the universe.
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(mysterious music)
- [Woman] Black holes are among
the most fascinating
objects in our universe,
and also the most mysterious.
A black hole is a region in space
where the force of gravity is so strong,
not even light, the fastest known entity
in our universe, can escape.
The boundary of a black hole
is called the event horizon,
a point of no return, beyond
which we truly cannot see.
When something crosses the event horizon,
it collapses into the
black hole's singularity,
an infinitely small,
infinitely dense point
where space, time, and the laws
of physics no longer apply.
Scientists have theorized
several different types
of black holes, with stellar
and supermassive black holes
being the most common.
Stellar black holes
form when massive stars
die and collapse.
They're roughly 10 to 20
times the mass of our sun,
and scattered throughout the universe.
There could be millions of
these stellar black holes
in the Milky Way alone.
Supermassive black holes
are giants by comparison,
measuring millions,
even billions of times,
more massive than our sun.
Scientists can only guess how they form,
but we do know they exist at the center
of just about every large
galaxy, including our own.
Sagittarius A, the supermassive black hole
at the center of the Milky Way,
has a mass of roughly four million suns,
and has a diameter about the distance
between the earth and our sun.
Because black holes are invisible,
the only way for scientists to detect
and study them is to observe their effect
on nearby matter.
This includes accretion disks,
a disk of particles that
form when gases and dust
fall toward a black hole, and quasars,
jets of particles that blast out
of supermassive black holes.
Black holes remained largely
unknown until the 20th century.
In 1916, using Einstein's
general theory of relativity,
a German physicist named
Karl Schwartzschild
calculated that any mass
can become a black hole
if it were compressed tightly enough.
But it wasn't until 1971
when theory became reality.
Astronomers studying
the constellation Cygnus
