• Question: how and why does a black hole form?

    Asked by anon-150695 to Scott, Daniel, Hannah, Maggie, Ry on 16 Nov 2017. This question was also asked by 864grak44, Abu.D15.
    • Photo: Ry Cutter

      Ry Cutter answered on 16 Nov 2017:

      When a really heavy star (about 8 times the sun) runs out of fuel it collapses really fast, called an implosion! This creates a really dense core, it’s so dense that it has a super strong gravitational field. This gravity can bend light in a complete circle, the light can’t escape!
      With no light it looks black… a black hole!
      Black holes are crazy, the laws of physics start to break down. Which means black holes hold a lot of the secrets to solving physics in extreme gravity.
      The only way we can see black holes is by looking at how their gravity affects the environment around them. Like when a poor star gets sucked up by a black hole! (this is how we found the first black hole)
      Great question,
      Ryan

    • Photo: Maggie Lieu

      Maggie Lieu answered on 16 Nov 2017:

      At the end of a stars life (when it has used up all its fuel) depending on how heavy the star is will determine if it becomes are black hole or not. Light/average mass stars like our sun will turn into a white dwarf. Medium mass stars turn into neutron stars. The heaviest stars have a lot of gravity, and when they start to die, the gravity squishes in the outer layer so much until the star explodes into supernova. This is the largest explosion in the Universe that we have seen. The core of the star then shrinks down until it becomes a single point. A singularity. All the mass of the star is contained in this tiny point and so it has a very strong gravity. The gravity is so strong that even light can’t escape it and thats why we call it a black hole.

      Bonus fact: There is a star close to us called Betelgeuse and it is dying. It will soon go supernova and when it does, it will be brighter than the moon!

    • Photo: Hannah Middleton

      Hannah Middleton answered on 17 Nov 2017:

      A black hole forms at the end of a really massive stars life and just like Maggie said, what happens depends on the massive of the star. The black holes that come from stars have around 10 times more mass than our sun (we’ve pick up signals from black holes that are 30 times the mass of our sun).
      There also are some other much more massive black holes our there! At the centre of most galaxies we think there are super massive black holes, which are millions of times more massive than our sun! The one in the middle of the Milky Way, our galaxy, is called Sagittarius AMATOMO_URL Astrophysicists are still figuring out how the supermassive black holes first form, but we think that get bigger and bigger over the universe’s history by merging with each other!

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