Black Holes

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Black Holes

Black holes are one of the most fascinating and unrealistic seeming objects in the world to many people. They seem to be right out of a science fiction novel, along with white holes, and wormholes. So far white holes and wormholes are still only science fiction. A white hole is a reverse of a black hole. And a wormhole is a combination of a white a black hole said to be a place of time travel. However, even quite a long time ago some members of our society realized that the black hole is not science fiction, but is very real and is very interesting. I plan to take you with me on my road to discovering black holes; the history of black holes, what is a black hole, how are they formed, singularity and event horizon, are black holes black and how to detect them, accretion disk, and black holes and evaporation.
About two centuries ago an English geologist named John Michell came to the conclusion that it is tentatively possible for gravity to be so overpowering that nothing, not even light traveling at the speed or 186,000 miles an hour could escape. To produce this much gravity, the source would have to be tremendously massive and exceptionally dense. In that day in time it was thought to be impossible for something such as a "dark star" to exist.
In 1916 the German astronomer tried to theorize how a star could shrink and become what was then typically called a frozen star. He then predicted that our sun would reduce in size two miles in radius. He also predicted that even though the sun had shrunk that its mass and weight would stay the same. This would leave the planets unaffected and continuing on their orbits. There was a question still remaining whether the star would become compacted or not.
In 1934 F. Zwicky and W. Baade calculated that the collapse of a star would cause the strip the atoms of their electrons, thus becoming a neutron star.
Sometime in the 1960's a man name John Archibald Wheeler came up with the term black hole for what had...
  • Submitted by: lana627
  • Date Submitted: 07/31/2006 10:10 PM
  • Category: Science
  • Words: 2031
  • Pages: 9
  • Views: 500
  • Rank: 106028

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