Image Credit: Flickr User thebadastronomer, via CC
Holes in space? Does our space have holes? Why am I calling them spooky? The holes that I’m talking about are actually a name given to some very powerful force that exists in Universe. The name is called BLACK HOLES by the scientists.
I call them spooky because they eat up everything that goes near them!! Yeah true! Black holes have immensely strong gravity.
Black holes are formed when an enormous star, many times bigger than sun, starts collapsing because of an explosion called supernova explosion. As a result of this, the star starts losing its size and volume and all its matter gets tightly packed in a small space. This makes the star very dense!
This force or black hole pulls everything into it. Even light, the fastest travelling thing that we know of, cannot escape it. That is exactly the reason why they are black; no light gets reflected from them!! In dark universe, they are almost invisible. Super massive black holes can be million times heavier than sun but still invisible.
Image Credit: Flickr User thebadastronomer, via CC
But tell me one thing. If they are invisible, how do scientists even know about it? Though they are not visible, astronomers have scientific methods to determine that they do exist.Matter like gas molecules, swirl around the black hole at a very fast speed due to its force of gravity. This heats up the matter to an extent that it emits X-rays before finally Plunging into the black hole. These X-rays can be detected from the Earth.
Black holes exist in the middle of big galaxies. May be there is one in the center of our galaxy, The Milky Way! Why not!!
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