Black holes form when massive stars collapse at the end of their life cycle. They can continue growing by absorbing surrounding mass and merging with other black holes. Supermassive black holes of millions of solar masses exist at the centers of most galaxies. The presence of a black hole can be detected through its interaction with matter like accretion disks and effects on orbiting stars. Gravitational wave detections in 2016 and 2019 provided the first direct observations of black hole mergers and the first image of a black hole.
Black holes form when massive stars collapse at the end of their life cycle. They can continue growing by absorbing surrounding mass and merging with other black holes. Supermassive black holes of millions of solar masses exist at the centers of most galaxies. The presence of a black hole can be detected through its interaction with matter like accretion disks and effects on orbiting stars. Gravitational wave detections in 2016 and 2019 provided the first direct observations of black hole mergers and the first image of a black hole.
Black holes form when massive stars collapse at the end of their life cycle. They can continue growing by absorbing surrounding mass and merging with other black holes. Supermassive black holes of millions of solar masses exist at the centers of most galaxies. The presence of a black hole can be detected through its interaction with matter like accretion disks and effects on orbiting stars. Gravitational wave detections in 2016 and 2019 provided the first direct observations of black hole mergers and the first image of a black hole.
Black holes form when massive stars collapse at the end of their life cycle. They can continue growing by absorbing surrounding mass and merging with other black holes. Supermassive black holes of millions of solar masses exist at the centers of most galaxies. The presence of a black hole can be detected through its interaction with matter like accretion disks and effects on orbiting stars. Gravitational wave detections in 2016 and 2019 provided the first direct observations of black hole mergers and the first image of a black hole.
Contents Black holes of stellar mass are expected to
form when very massive stars collapse at the I General 2 end of their life cycle. After a black hole has formed, it can continue to grow by absorb- II History 3 ing mass from its surroundings. By absorbing 1 General relativity . . . . . . . . 3 other stars and merging with other black holes, supermassive black holes of millions of solar III Reference 4 masses may form. There is consensus that su- permassive black holes exist in the centers of most galaxies. I General The presence of a black hole can be in- A black hole is a region of spacetime exhibit- ferred through its interaction with other mat- ing gravitational acceleration so strong that ter and with electromagnetic radiation such as nothing - no particles or even electromagnetic visible light. Matter that falls onto a black radiation such as light - can escape from it. hole can form an external accretion disk heated The theory of general relativity predicts that by friction, forming some of the brightest ob- a sufficiently compact mass can deform space- jects in the universe. Stars passing too close time to form a black hole. The boundary of to a supermassive black hole can be shred into the region from which no escape is possible is streamers that shine very brightly before be- called the event horizon. Although the event ing ”swallowed”. If there are other stars or- horizon has an enormous effect on the fate biting a black hole, their orbits can be used and circumstances of an object crossing it, to determine the black hole’s mass and loca- no locally detectable features appear to be ob- tion. Such observations can be used to exclude served. In many ways, a black hole acts like an possible alternatives such as neutron stars. In ideal black body, as it reflects no light. More- this way, astronomers have identified numerous over, quantum field theory in curved spacetime stellar black hole candidates in binary systems, predicts that event horizons emit Hawking ra- and established that the radio source known as diation, with the same spectrum as a black Sagittarius A*, at the core of the Milky Way body of a temperature inversely proportional galaxy, contains a supermassive black hole of to its mass. This temperature is on the order about 4.3 million solar masses. of billionths of a kelvin for black holes of stel- lar mass, making it essentially impossible to On 11 February 2016, the LIGO collabora-tion observe. Objects whose gravitational fields are announced the first direct detection of gravita- too strong for light to escape were first con- tional waves, which also represented the first sidered in the 18th century by John Michell observation of a black hole merger. As of De- and Pierre-Simon Laplace. The first mod- cember 2018, eleven gravitational wave events ern solution of general relativity that would have been observed that originated from ten characterize a black hole was found by Karl merging black holes (along with one binary Schwarzschild in 1916, although its interpreta- neutron star merger). On 10 April 2019, the tion as a region of space from which nothing first ever direct image of a black hole and its can escape was first published by David Finkel- vicinity was published, following observations stein in 1958. Black holes were long considered made by the Event Horizon Telescope in 2017 a mathematical curiosity; it was during the of the supermassive black hole in ulMessier 87’s 1960s that theoretical work showed they were galactic centre. a generic prediction of general relativity. The discovery of neutron stars by Jocelyn Bell Bur- nell in 1967 sparked interest in gravitationally collapsed compact objects as a possible astro- physical reality. LATEX 2ε THE BLACK HOLE
II History stood at the time. In 1924, Arthur Edding-ton
showed that the singularity disappeared after The idea of a body so massive that even a change of coordinates, although it took until light could not escape was briefly proposed 1933 for Georges Lemaıtre to realize that this by astronomical pioneer and English clergy- meant the singularity at the Schwarzschild ra- man John Michell in a letter published in dius was a non-physical coordinate singularity. November 1784. Michell’s simplistic calcu- Arthur Eddington did however comment on lations assumed such a body might have the the possibility of a star with mass compressed same density as underlinethe Sun’s, and con- to the Schwarzschild radius in a 1926 book, cluded that such a body would form when a noting that Einstein’s theory allows us to rule star’s diameter exceeds underlinethe Sun’s by out overly large densities for visible stars like a factor of 500, and the surface escape velocity Betelgeuse because ”A star of 250 million km exceeds the usual speed of light. Michell cor- radius could not possibly have so high a density rectly noted that such supermassive but non- as the sun. Firstly, the force of gravitation would radiating bodies might be detectable through be so great that light would be unable to escape their gravitational effects on nearby visible from it, the rays falling back to the star like a bodies. Scholars of the time were initially ex- stone to the earth. Secondly, the red shift of the cited by the proposal that giant but invisible spectral lines would be so great that the spec- stars might be hiding in plain view, but enthu- trum would be shifted out of existence. siasm dampened when the wavelike nature of Thirdly, the mass would produce so much curva- light became apparent in the early nineteenth ture of the space-time metric that space would century. close up around the star, leaving us outside (i.e., If light were a wave rather than a ”corpuscle”, nowhere).” it is unclear what, if any, influence gravity would have on escaping light waves. Modern In 1931, Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar physics discredits Michell’s notion of a light calculated, using special relativity, that a non- ray shooting directly from the surface of a rotating body of electron-degenerate matter supermassive star, being slowed down by the above a certain limiting mass (now called the star’s gravity, stopping, and then free-falling Chandrasekhar limit at 1.4 M) has no sta- back to the star’s surface. ble solutions. His arguments were opposed by many of his contemporaries like Edding- ton and Lev Landau, who argued that some yet unknown mechanism would stop the col- 1 General relativity lapse. They were partly correct: a white dwarf slightly more massive than the Chan- In 1915, Albert Einstein developed his theory drasekhar limit will collapse into a neutron of general relativity, having earlier shown that star, which is itself stable. But in 1939, gravity does influence light’s motion. Only a Robert Oppenheimer and others predicted few months later, UKarl Schwarzschild found a that neutron stars above another limit (the solution to the Einstein field equations, which Tolman-Oppenheimer-Volkoff limit) would col- describes the gravitational field of a point mass lapse further for the reasons presented by and a spherical mass. A few months after Chandrasekhar, and concluded that no law of Schwarzschild, Johannes Droste, a student of physics was likely to intervene and stop at Hendrik Lorentz, independently gave the same least some stars from collapsing to black holes. solution for the point mass and wrote more Their original calculations, based on the Pauli extensively about its properties. This solu- exclusion principle, gave it as 0.7 tion had a peculiar behaviour at what is now called the Schwarzschild radius, where it be- came singular, meaning that some of the terms in the Einstein equations became infinite. The nature of this surface was not quite under- LATEX 2ε THE BLACK HOLE
M; subsequent consideration of strong
forcemediated neutron-neutron repulsion raised the estimate to approximately 1.5 M to 3.0 M. Observations of the neutron star merger GW170817, which is thought to have generated a black hole shortly afterward, have refined the TOV limit estimate to 2.17 M. Oppenheimer and his co-authors inter- preted the singularity at the boundary of the Schwarzschild radius as indicating that this was the boundary of a bubble in which time stopped. This is a valid point of view for ex- ternal observers, but not for infalling observers. Because of this property, the collapsed stars were called ”frozen stars”, because an out- side observer would see the surface of the star frozen in time at the instant where its collapse takes it to the Schwarzschild radius.