Black Holes

Author: Adhitya Sriram

Black Holes are a singular point in space that are made up of matter packed into a small point known as a singularity. Because of their density, a black hole’s gravitational pull is strong enough to not even let light escape(light travels at precisely 670,616,629 miles per hour or around 671 million for rounding). They were first proposed in 1915 by the german physicist Karl Schwarzschild,  when he applied the general theory of relativity to a very dense object. Now we know that at the center of each galaxy there lies a supermassive black hole millions or billions of times heavier than the sun. Black Holes can die from a phenomenon known as Hawking Radiation, though it takes trillions of years for even 0.0000000001% of a black hole to die. The most massive black hole is TON 618 with a mass of more than 66 billion times that of our sun. Each solar mass(sun’s mass) is equal to 2 x 10^30 kilograms or 2,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 kilograms. That is around 4.5 x 10^30 or 4,500,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 pounds. Black holes are an interesting phenomenon of space and time.

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