• Question: What does a black hole do?

    Asked by Amyw15 to Daniel, Maggie, Ry, Scott on 15 Nov 2017.
    • Photo: Ry Cutter

      Ry Cutter answered on 15 Nov 2017:


      On their own they don’t really do anything. But it’s like a fly trap for stars! If a star gets too close, the black hole is going to suck it up. When the poor star gets sucked up we see a bright source of light, this was how we found the first black hole.
      If two black holes meet, they spin around each other very quickly until they collide. This is how gravitational waves are made. This was also how we detected the first gravitational wave after looking for 100 years!
      Brilliant Question,
      Ryan 😀

    • Photo: Maggie Lieu

      Maggie Lieu answered on 15 Nov 2017:


      Black holes are places with so much mass and gravity that even light can’t escape it! They like to absorb all things around it, some of them spin and some of them have giant jets (these are called AGN)

    • Photo: Scott Melville

      Scott Melville answered on 16 Nov 2017:


      A black hole does something very VERY complicated – which still don’t quite understand.
      .
      As far as we can tell, a black hole is so heavy that it just sits there gobbling up everything in sight. It eats up whole stars, planets, and even just pure light (that’s why it looks ‘black’, because all of the light has been munched!).
      And what does it do with all of the ‘stuff’ that it’s gobbled? Well we think it starts to heat up somehow (you’d feel pretty hot too if you had just eaten a whole star 😉 ), and basically sweats lots of thermal particles back into space. So it’s a bit like a person – eating lots of food and generating lots of heat. As it sweats, it changes size and gets a bit cooler – it really evolves in some mysterious way 🙂

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