“Space-time grips mass, telling it how to move; mass grips space-time, telling it how to curve,” said John Wheeler, a leading expert in Black Holes. Wheeler is one of many scientists who study Black Holes. They continue to amaze the scientific community.
By their very nature, Black Holes defy description. Throughout history people have not seen Black Holes. The first credited person to develop the concept of Black Holes was Karl Schwarzschild. Schwarzschild was a German Jewish physicist and astronomer born on October 9, 1873. Schwarzschild was an important aspect in discovering Black Holes. Another important person in the discovery of Black Holes was Albert Einstein. Einstein's theory of Relativity paved the way for future cosmologists in the study of Black Holes.
Black Holes have a tremendous effect on its surrounding. Black Holes can be discovered through the process of detecting objects in space that emit little or no light. Another tactic of detecting Black Holes is to study its surrounding. Since a Black Hole has almost infinite mass, the gravitational pull of its singularity (center) is very extreme. Once an object, or even light, crosses its event horizon, or outer ring, it cannot escape and is pushed towards the singularity. However Black Holes are not entirely invisible, they do emit kinds of radiation which can also be detected.
The size of a Black Hole is often referred to the length between its singularity and event horizon, or often called the point of no return. For a Black Hole of solar mass, equivalent to the mass of our sun, the distance from its singularity to its event horizon is roughly 1 kilometer. Currently there are two different types of Black Holes, a Kerr Black Hole and a Schwarzschild Black Hole. A Kerr Black Hole is a rotating, spherical Black Hole with a ring singularity, and a Schwarzschild Black Hole is a static, spherical non-rotating Black Hole.
The life of a Black Hole is very complex. First a Black Hole is formed when so much mass or energy of a star gathers in a small volume in which gravitational force overwhelms all others and the star collapses into itself. This occurrence usually happens when you have a hyper giant star (which is about 1,000 times the mass of our Sun) nearing the end of its lifetime. The expected lifetime of a Black Hole of solar mass is approximately 10 to the seventy-third power! Throughout its life a Black Hole emit radiation which in times causes it to shrink and eventually evaporate.
Recently more people are interested in the study of Black Holes. Light is affected by gravity because it has momentum and energy. This would explain why Black Holes appear invisible since it has an extreme amount of gravitational force it will pull in light that has come neat it. Thus no light is reflected for the human eye's to see. In more recent studies cosmologists have discovered that the mass of any object curves space and time. Due to the extreme mass of a Black Hole it creates a phenomena in which space and time are curved so greatly that scientist are puzzled about what really happens inside a Black Hole.
