Hello there! This is the introduction to black holes!
Let's start with the birth of black holes.
Black holes are born via either 2 of the processes:
The first one is a supernova.
So a supernova occurs when a star's mass is above the Chandrasekhar limit.
And what happens is that the *star's* core is not able to support the outer layers of the star.
And then the star collapses in on itself.
And then it becomes so dense that becomes a black hole.
The other process is called a kilonova explosion.
which is basically 2 neutron stars in an orbit and they crash and kill each other.
As you are able to see the animation, the neutron stars
are in the orbit around each other and they're killing each other, *thus forming a black hole*.
So a black hole's gravity is so strong that even light can't
escape it which is the fastest thing that we know of (It actually includes the entire electromagnetic spectrum. I just mentioned light because that's the only form we can see).
Anyways, if they don't even emit light, how did we know that they existed?
So basically what happened was that we could observe
it's effects around another object.
So if we look at like a star get ripped and form an orbit around nothing,
then we're going to probably assume that there's a black hole there.
And that's how we figured out that there was a black hole there.
The next thing I'm going to explain is how they die.
A black hole dies through a process called Hawking radiation(discovered by Stephen Hawking).
So, if I look at some empty space, like over here,
you see, it's not really empty.
So what happens is that there are virtual particles and
antiparticles popping into existence and annihilating each other again.
This is called the Heisenberg uncertainty principle(Discovered by Werner Heisenberg).
You have to keep in mind that they're just virtual particles.
They're not real ones or they would violate the Law of Conservation of Energy.
Anyways, when this happens at the edge of a black hole,
what happens is that the virtual anti-particle gets sucked in,
and the virtual particle becomes a real particle by taking some of the black hole's mass.
And we see that as radiation.
But don't hold your breath for it. I mean the biggest
black holes we know, they take up to like a googol years.
A googol years is a 1 followed by 100 zeros after it.
