In fact, he showed that they inevitably do. This renewed interest in the decades-old question of whether black holes were just a mathematical artifact of Einstein’s theory, or if they actually form in the universe. These objects were so bright that researchers hypothesized that they might be the gleam of material falling into ultra-compact, supermassive objects. Roger Penrose made his key contribution in 1965, not long after the discovery of superluminous objects called quasars. What did Roger Penrose figure out about black holes? In the coming years, the James Webb Space Telescope’s observations of very distant and very young galaxies could solve the puzzle. But whether they started as stars that gravitationally collapsed into black holes and then grew astronomically, or formed from the direct collapse of huge pockets of plasma - or in some other way - remains an open question. These behemoths probably formed within the universe’s first billion years, as galaxies took shape around them. Less certainty surrounds the formation of supermassive black holes, like the 4-million-solar-mass black hole named Sagittarius A* that Reinhard Genzel, Andrea Ghez and their teams studied in the center of the Milky Way. With outward radiation pressure no longer able to counteract the inward lurch of gravity, the star’s core inwardly collapses - an event usually accompanied by a dramatic explosion called a supernova. They typically form when stars at least 10 times more massive than the sun run out of fuel. Just how densely? To form a black hole, Earth would have to shrink into a sphere smaller than a pingpong ball.Īlthough such tiny black holes might have formed during the Big Bang (these are hypothetical entities known as “primordial black holes,” which might comprise the universe’s missing dark matter), the ones observed in the universe today are larger. How do black holes form?īlack holes form when matter or energy is packed together densely enough. Physicists think that they’ll have to come up with a quantum theory of gravity to understand black hole singularities. These objects show that the theory must be incomplete. Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity predicts that the curvature of space-time becomes infinite in a black hole singularity, but this isn’t physically possible. Each one can be characterized by only its mass, electric charge and angular momentum - making them rather like elementary particles.īut although they look simple from the outside, black holes are deeply mysterious on the inside. They’re said to have “no hair,” meaning all distinctive features seem to wash away when they form. In some ways, black holes are incredibly simple. Try to picture the funnel in three dimensions, though, where material falls inward from every direction toward a central point. Go too far down, and you’ll find yourself unable to climb back out. A common way to visualize a black hole is as a two-dimensional sheet stretched into a funnel.
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