The Very End of Space and Time

Just as white dwarfs can get too massive for their electrons to support them, so too can neutron
stars become too heavy for their neutrons. When gravity wins in a neutron star, however, Nature has
no more tricks left. All of the matter is sucked down into one single point. With all this density, space
and time warp so severely that the very fabric of spacetime is torn. The gravity is so extreme that not
even light can escape, and time itself comes to an end. A black hole
has formed.
We call a black hole a "star", even though it is completely unlike what we normally think of when we
think of a star. To see how, take a disc reaching through the middle of this star, just as we did before.
The "hill" feature we saw in the neutron star has turned into something much worse here. We can't
show all of it in this picture; it won't fit into our space and time. If we try to draw a circle around this
hill, we find that no rope from the outside can possibly reach down to its center without snapping.
What's worse, the relative rate of time's flow slows to nothing at the edge.

Part of the geometry around a black hole. Time's relative rate of flow around the black hole is shown on the
color scale. Time appears to slow significantly and even stop at the edge of the hole.
What does this mean?

This hole in the middle of the hill has a name. It represents a sphere in three-dimensional space
called the event horizon
. This unique surface is the place where everything inside is cut off from the rest of the Universe. It
turns out that anything that moves to the inside of this sphere can never get back out. Even light,
travelling as fast as anything possibly can, cannot get out. This is why it's called a black hole.
The size of this surface grows with the mass of the black hole. If our Sun turned into a black hole,
the event horizon could be surrounded by a circle just 9 kilometersabout 6 milesaround. (The
Sun as it is today is over four million kilometers3 million milesaround.) A black hole which is
twice as heavy would be twice as big around.

Now, your age-defying twin might notice that time near the event horizon doesn't just appear to slow
to a crawl, but appears to stop all together! If your twin left you and got too close to the event
horizon, your twin would stop aging entirely, from your point of view. Your twin's life would simply
seem to be on pause for eternity.
Unfortunately, this fate is not what your twin would experience. Your twin would actually pass through
the event horizon, and find the time and space on the other side. But this time and space is pretty
special. Your twin could not possibly avoid crashing into the point in the center containing all the
matter of the star, in a very short amount of time. This is an example of different observers taking
different slices of spacetime, and seeing vastly different things: you see your twin slow down and
stop at the event horizon; your twin sees the horizon come and go.
That point in the center which will soon hold the remains of your hapless twin is called asingularity
. All the mass of the black hole is crushed into an infinitesimally small region. This warps the
spacetime so severely that the warping is actually infinite. You might say that the very fabric of
spacetime has been torn, and a tiny point taken out of it. The physics close to singularities is still a
mystery. We are almost certain, however, that they exist, and are found hidden at the centers of
black holes.
We might also wonder whether or not black holes can have bumps, just like the neutron star we saw
above. It turns out that this is possible. The event horizon will change shape whenever something
falls in, leaving it bumpy. However, these bumps will spread out and ripple around the event horizon,
just as a stone dropped in a calm pond will disturb the water momentarily. As the bumps ripple
around, they will make all spacetime around them ripple just the same. The black hole will give off
gravitational waves. These waves carry off energy, and make the event horizon stop rippling. A black
hole with no spin will settle down into a perfect sphere. A spinning black hole will settle down to a
slightly flattened sphere.
Listen to the sounds of a black hole, as it sheds its bumps after a tumultuous encounter. As the hole gives of
its ripples in the form of gravitational waves, it sounds similar to a taut drumhead. The more massive the
hole, the larger the drum; the more quickly spinning the hole, the more taut the drumhead.
A black hole ten times more massive than our own Sun
A black hole twenty times more massive than our own Sun
A black hole forty times more massive than our own Sun
A quickly-spinning black hole ten times more massive than our own Sun
A quickly-spinning black hole twenty times more massive than our own Sun
A quickly-spinning black hole forty times more massive than our own Sun

In fact, for a calm black holeafter the rippling stopsthere are just three things that completely
determine how the black hole's gravity looks to anyone on the outside: its mass, the amount of
electric charge it contains, and how quickly it spins. Any two calm black holes with the same mass,

charge, and spin will look exactly the same in every other respect. A lone black hole is not expected
to have much of a charge, so astrophysicists usually just talk about the mass and spin of a black
hole.

The Evidence for Black Holes

A pair of "globular star clusters" viewed by the Hubble Space Telescope. By studying the motions of stars in
these pictures, astronomers have deduced that something very massive, yet very small, lies at the center of
each cluster. Black Holes are the only known candidate for what these massive objects may be.

One of the problems with black holes is that they arenaturallyvery hard to see. Fortunately,
black holes affect things around them through their intense, unmatchable gravity. These nearby
things frequently give off light, allowing us to watch as the black hole pulls them around. For
example, we might see a star floating in what appears to be empty space. But if this star is moving in
a circle, we would know that there must be some massive object warping the spacetime near the
star. By measuring how quickly the star is orbiting, astronomers can deduce how heavy the central
object is. If there is enough mass packed into a small enough volume, with no light coming out, we
would likely have a black hole. Stars orbiting like this around unseen dark objects have actually been
found. By watching stars like the ones in the pictures, astronomers can measure how quickly they
are orbiting. These particular clusters of stars have been measured, and are suspected of harboring
black holes.

The center of our own Milky Way galaxy, as seen by the Chandra X-Ray Telescope.

The most likely place we would expect to find a large concentration of mass is right among lots of
other massat the center of a galaxy, for instance. If a black hole took up residence in the middle of

a galaxy, it could eat up many stars and grow into a huge black hole. Indeed, astronomers have
found stars in the center of our own Milky Way galaxy orbiting with astonishing speeds. Some stars
orbit the center every 15 years, at speeds of over 3,000 miles per hour. That means that whatever is
warping spacetime in the center of our galaxy is several million times as massive as our Sun. All that
mass, however, is packed into a region just a few times bigger than our Sun is now. With so much
mass packed into such a small region, physicists can't imagine anything but a black hole.
In fact, it seems likely that most galaxies have a supermassive black hole at their centers. Some of
these black holes are swallowing matter so quickly that the matter falling in bumps into other matter.
All this bumping, at the extreme speeds around a black hole, makes the matter heat up
tremendously. All that heating makes the matter glow, as in the picture below on the left, which
shows a galaxy with a supermassive central black hole at its center.
Sometimes this hot matter gets caught up in a magnetic field. Because of the odd nature of the
magnetic force, such quickly moving matter may actually curve away from the black hole, and be
shot out away from the center of the galaxy. A supermassive Black Hole in the middle of so much
matter would actually be extraordinarily bright. Astronomers have identified many sources they
callactive galactic nuclei
(or AGNs) which shine more brightly than all the stars found in the galaxies around them. These
AGNs are believed to be powered by black holes.

The "Seyfert" galaxy Circinusas seen in this Hubble Space Telescope imageis believed to be lit by a
powerful black hole at its center.

The active galactic nucleus of M87 produced this 30,000,000,000,000,000 mile-long jet, as seen by the Hubble
Space Telescope.

A quasar
is a similar object seen in the far reaches of space. To the casual observer, quasars appear just like
regular nearby stars. However, careful measurements by astronomers show that they are
extraordinarily far away. This means that they must be extraordinarily bright, also. In fact, the light
they give off is sometimes brighter than dozens of normal galaxies. For something to be so
energetic, it must have plenty of matter to fuel itthat is, it must be fantastically massive. On the
other hand, the light coming from a quasar changes greatly every few months, days, or hours. If a
huge object were to change in brightness, we would expect that change to happen very slowly. In
particular, scientists believe that an object can only change in brightness as quickly as it takes light
to move from one side of the object to the other. This means that a typical quasar might only be
comparable in size to our solar system. Again, all that matter packed into such a small region can
only be explained by a black holeas far as we know. All of this evidence is not rock-solid.
Observations with gravitational waves have the potential to give us far more solid facts to prove the
existence of black holes.
Hawking Radiation
The black holes we've seen above were defined to be regions of spacetime from which nothing can escape.
According to general relativity, such regions can exist, and in fact must be the final state of any star
weighing in at more than a few times as much as our Sun. Unfortunately, that's not the whole story.
Current theories of physics are only approximately correct. Newton's classical theory of motion and gravity
was just like this. It worked very well in most cases, but there were exceptions. With the General Theory of
Relativity, Einstein filled many of the gaps. He could not fill all of them, however.
There is another modern theory of physics called quantum mechanics
. This theory deals with very small, and very energetic particles. Quantum mechanics is vital, for example,
when trying to describe electrons moving around an atom or inside a computer chip. Trying to describe
these things with general relativity leads to complete failure. On the other hand, trying to describe gravity
with quantum mechanics also leads to complete failure. Neither theory is always wrong, but neither theory is
always right.
Quantum field theory in curved spacetime
is an attempt to bring quantum mechanics into the curved spacetime of general relativity. This theory allows
us, for instance, to understand the behavior of tiny particles like electrons and photons in areas of extreme

curvaturearound a black hole, for example.

One of the many surprising predictions of quantum field theory is that the vacuum of space is actually a
boiling soup of virtual particles
. These are pairs of particles that flit into and out of existence, very briefly. Virtual particles will borrow
energy from the empty space around them, leaving that space with negative energy. Ordinarily, the empty
space will then pull the virtual particles back to regain its energy. In an area of extreme gravity, however, the
particles can gain enough gravitational energy that the are able to return the borrowed energy to the empty
space, and survive as real particles. One virtual particle falls into the hole, while the other escapes. A black
hole is constantly giving off this faint glow of escaping particles as Hawking radiation. It gives up its energy
and mass to the particles steaming from it. Over very long times, this leakage drains mass from the black
hole so that it shrinks down. If nothing were to fall in to offset this loss, the hole could evaporate into
nothingness.
In 1974, Stephen Hawking used the theory of quantum fields in curved spacetime to prove that this
phenomenon takes place. It was a great surprise to everyoneespecially because it seemed to contradict
one of Hawking's own previous great successes in Relativity theory, and to go against intuition about what a
black hole is. Over time, more and more experts came to agree with Professor Hawking. Never one to shy
from controversy, Hawking has come to support another new idea about black holes. His new position may
yet rescue something of our notion about black holes as places where all is lost forever.
We can imagine sending something into a black hole, and trying to see if the evaporation coming out was
affected by whatever we dumped in. Hawking's belief (currently) is that whatever has gone into the black hole
will have absolutely no effect on what comes back out. What is surprising about this position is that it runs
contrary to what Hawking believed for many years. His reversal is simply a demonstration of the difficulty
that even the most respected experts have in understanding how black holes work. There is still much to be
explored, tested, and understood about black holes, and spacetime in general, as well as quantum
mechanics. How these two theoriesrelativity and quantum mechanicsfit together is perhaps the greatest
and most promising mystery in all of physics.