Help with black holes?

Matter exists in a black hole, but at infinite density in a center called a "singularity" of zero size. It's called "black" because light, traveling at about 186,000 miles per second, is not fast enough to escape its immense gravity.

The greater the mass, the further light can be from the singularity as still be unable to escape. The distance to that point defines an "event horizon" for the black hole. Anything falling inside that event horizon would have to exceed the speed of light to escape, but that's not possible according to Relativity theory, so nothing can escape from within the event horizon.

You can safely orbit outside the event horizon, just like any other gravitational source, if you are traveling fast enough tangent to the event horizon. To fully describe what happens near a black hole, you need Einstein's Relativity equations, which modify Newton's simpler Universal Law of Gravitation.

Black holes are created by a star dieing and collapsing in on it's self, becoming so dense it actually rips a hole in space creating said "black hole". Nothing can escape a black hole, not even light. The black hole does not lead any where, it spits the stuff it sucked in back out as energy.

picture of a black hole spitting out energy, well what it WOULD look like.

http://app.ucdavis.edu/algebra/blackhole3.jpg

more help on black holes.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_hole

http://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/science/know_l2/...

A black hole is just a large amount of mass in a very small place. Like a star, it has mass and gravitational pull.

If you fell into one, you be just as dead as you would be if you fell into a star or even a planet.

A planet or any other object can orbit a black hole, just that same way they could orbit a star.

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According to the general theory of relativity, a black hole is a region of space from which nothing, including light, can escape. It is the result of the deformation of spacetime caused by a very compact mass. Around a black hole there is an undetectable surface which marks the point of no return, called an event horizon. It is called "black" because it absorbs all the light that hits it, reflecting nothing, just like a perfect black body in thermodynamics.[1] Under the theory of quantum mechanics black holes possess a temperature and emit Hawking radiation.

Despite its invisible interior, a black hole can be observed through its interaction with other matter. A black hole can be inferred by tracking the movement of a group of stars that orbit a region in space. Alternatively, when gas falls into a stellar black hole from a companion star, the gas spirals inward, heating to very high temperatures and emitting large amounts of radiation that can be detected from earthbound and Earth-orbiting telescopes.

Astronomers have identified numerous stellar black hole candidates, and have also found evidence of supermassive black holes at the center of galaxies. After observing the motion of nearby stars for 16 years, in 2008 astronomers found compelling evidence that a supermassive black hole of more than 4 million solar masses is located near the Sagittarius A* region in the center of the Milky Way galaxy.

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The defining feature of a black hole is the appearance of an event horizon—a boundary in spacetime through which matter and light can only pass inward towards the mass of the black hole. Nothing, including light, can escape from inside the event horizon. The event horizon is referred to as such because if an event occurs within the boundary, light from that event cannot reach an outside observer, making it impossible to determine if such an event occurred.[30]

As predicted by general relativity, the presence of a large mass deforms spacetime in such a way that the paths particles take bend towards the mass. At the event horizon of a black hole, this deformation becomes so strong that there are no paths that lead away from the black hole.[31]

To a distant observer, clocks near a black hole appear to tick more slowly than those further away from the black hole.[32] Due to this effect, known as gravitational time dilation, an object falling into a black hole appears to slow down as it approaches the event horizon, taking an infinite time to reach it.[33] At the same time, all processes on this object slow down causing emitted light to appear redder and dimmer, an effect known as gravitational redshift.[34] Eventually, at a point just before it reaches the event horizon, the falling object becomes so dim that it can no longer be seen.

On the other hand, an observer falling into a black hole does not notice any of these effects as he crosses the event horizon. According to his own clock, he crosses the event horizon after a finite time, although he is unable to determine exactly when he crosses it, as it is impossible to determine the location of the event horizon from local observations.[35]

For a non rotating (static) black hole, the Schwarzschild radius delimits a spherical event horizon. The Schwarzschild radius of an object is proportional to the mass.[36] Rotating black holes have distorted, nonspherical event horizons. Since the event horizon is not a material surface but rather merely a mathematically defined demarcation boundary, nothing prevents matter or radiation from entering a black hole, only from exiting one. The description of black holes given by general relativity is known to be an approximation, and some scientists expect that quantum gravity effects will become significant near the vicinity of the event horizon.[37] This would allow observations of matter near a black hole's event horizon to be used to indirectly study general relativity and proposed extensions to it.

Gravitational collapse occurs when an object's internal pressure is insufficient to resist the object's own gravity. For stars this usually occurs either because a star has too little "fuel" left to maintain its temperature, or because a star which would have been stable receives extra matter in a way which does not raise its core temperature. In either case the star's temperature is no longer high enough to prevent it from collapsing under its own weight (the ideal gas law explains the connection between pressure, temperature, and volume).[55]

The collapse may be stopped by the degeneracy pressure of the star's constituents, condensing the matter in an exotic denser state. The result is one of the various types of compact star. Which type of compact star is formed depends on the mass of the remnant — the matter left over after changes triggered by the collapse (such as supernova or pulsations leading to a planetary nebula) have blown away the outer layers. Note that this can be substantially less than t