black hole

is an object predicted bygeneral relativity

with a gravitational field sostrong that nothing can escape it — not even light.A black hole is

defined

to be a region of space-timewhere escape to the outside universe is impossible. The boundaryof this region is a surface called theevent horizon. This surface is not a physically tangible one, but merely a figurative concept of an imaginary boundary. Nothing can move from inside the event horizon to the outside, even briefly.

The existence of black holes in the universe is wellsupported byastronomical observation, particularlyfrom studyingX-rayemission fromX-ray binariesand active galactic nuclei. It has also been hypothesized thatblack holes radiate energy due toquantum mechanical effects known asHawking radiation.History

The concept of a body so massive that even light could not escape was put forward by theEnglishgeologist John Michellin a 1784 paper

[2]

sent toHenry Cavendishand published by theRoyal Society.At that time, the Newtonian theory of gravityand the concept of escape velocitywere well known. Michell computed that a body with 500 times theradius of the Sun and of the samedensitywould have, at its surface, an escape velocityequal to thespeed of light,and therefore would be invisible. In his words:

If the semi-diameter of a sphere of the same density as the Sun were toexceed that of the Sun in the proportion of 500 to 1, a body falling from aninfinite height towards it would have acquired at its surface greater velocity than that of light, and consequently supposing light to be attracted by the same force in proportion to its vis inertiae (inertial mass), with other bodies, all light emitted from such a body would be made to return towardsit by its own proper gravity.

Michell considered the possibility that many such objects that cannot be seen might be present in the cosmos.In 1796, the French mathematician Pierre-Simon Laplacepromoted the same idea in the first and second edition of his book

Exposition du système du Monde

. It disappeared inlater editions. The whole idea gained little attention in the nineteenth century, since lightwas thought to be a massless wave, not influenced by gravity.In 1915,Albert Einsteindeveloped the theory of gravity calledGeneral Relativity. Earlier he had shown that gravity does influence light. A few months later,Karl

Schwarzschild

[3]

[4]

gave the solutionfor the gravitational field of a point mass and a spherical mass, showing that something we now call a black hole could theoreticallyexist. TheSchwarzschild radiusis now known to be the radius of theevent horizonof a non-rotating black hole, but this was not well understood at that time. Schwarzschildhimself thought it was not physical. In a remarkable coincidence, the name

Schwarzschild

actually translates into

black shield

. In another coincidence, only a fewmonths after Schwarzschild, a student of Lorentz, Johannes Droste, independently gavethe same solution for the point mass as Schwarzschild had and wrote even moreextensively about its properties.In 1930,Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar argued that special relativity demonstrated that anon-radiating body above 1.44 solar masses, now known as the Chandrasekhar limit, would collapse since there was nothing known at that time that could stop it from doingso. His arguments were opposed by Arthur Eddington, who believed that something would inevitably stop the collapse. Both were correct, since awhite dwarf more massivethan the Chandrasekhar limit will collapse into aneutron star . However, a neutron star above about three solar masses (theTolman-Oppenheimer-Volkoff limit) will itself become unstable against collapse due to similar physics.In 1939,Robert Oppenheimer and H. Snyder predicted that massive stars could undergo adramaticgravitational collapse. Black holes could, in principle, be formed in nature. Suchobjects for a while were called

frozen stars

since the collapse would be observed torapidly slow down and become heavilyredshifted near the Schwarzschild radius. The mathematics showed that an outside observer would see the surface of the star frozen intime at the instant where it crosses that radius. However, these hypothetical objects werenot the topic of much interest until the late 1960s. Most physicists believed that they werea peculiar feature of the highly symmetric solution found by Schwarzschild, and thatobjects collapsing in nature would not form black holes.Interest in black holes was rekindled in 1967 because of theoretical and experimental progress. In 1970,Stephen Hawking andRoger Penroseproved that black holes are a generic feature in Einstein's theory of gravity, and cannot be avoided in some collapsingobjects.

[1]

Interest was renewed in the astronomical community with the discovery of pulsars. Shortly thereafter, the use of the expression "black hole" was coined bytheoretical physicistJohn Wheeler ,

[5]

being first used in his public lecture

Our Universe:the Known and Unknown

on29 December 1967. The older Newtonian objects of Michell and Laplace are often referred to as "dark stars" to distinguish them from the "black holes" of general relativity.

Evidence

A (simulated) Black Hole of ten solar masses as seen from a distance of 600 km with theMilky Way in the background (horizontal camera opening angle: 90°).

Formation

General relativity (as well as most other metric theories of gravity) not only says that black holes

can

exist, but in fact predicts that they will be formed in nature whenever asufficient amount of mass gets packed in a given region of space, through a processcalledgravitational collapse; as the mass inside the given region of space increases, itsgravity becomes stronger and (in the language of relativity) increasingly deforms thespace around it, ultimately until nothing (not even light) can escape the gravity; at this point anevent horizonis formed, and matter and energy must inevitably collapse to adensity beyond the limits of known physics. For example, if the Sun was compressed to aradius of roughly three kilometers (about 1/232,000 its present size), the resultinggravitational field would create an event horizon around it, and thus a black hole.A quantitative analysis of this idea led to the prediction that a stellar remnant above aboutthree to five times the mass of the Sun (the Tolman-Oppenheimer-Volkoff limit) would be unable to support itself as aneutron star viadegeneracy pressure, and would inevitably collapse into a black hole. Stellar remnants with this mass are expected to be producedimmediately at the end of the lives of stars that are more than 25 to 50 times the mass of the Sun, or by accretion of matter onto an existing neutron star . Stellar collapse will generate black holes containing at least three solar masses. Black holes smaller than this limit can only be created if their matter is subjected to sufficient pressure from some source other than self-gravitation. The enormous pressures neededfor this are thought to have existed in the very early stages of the universe, possiblycreating primordial black holeswhich could have masses smaller than that of the Sun.Supermassive black holesare believed to exist in the center of mostgalaxies,including our ownMilky Way. This type of black hole contains millions to billions of solar masses,and there are several models of how they might have been formed. The first is viagravitational collapse of a dense cluster of stars. A second is by large amounts of massaccreting onto a "seed" black hole of stellar mass. A third is by repeated fusion of smaller black holes.