Essay about Black Holes

Name: Franklin Aldás

According to Oxford dictionary, a black hole is a region of space having a gravitational field so
intense that no matter or radiation can escape. Because no light can escape from black holes, those
are invisible, i.e., we can’t obtain any information from them. Any massive object can be a black
hole if all of this mass is confined in a radius smaller than the Schwarzschild radius (r=2GM/c²),
where G is the gravitational constant, M is the mass of the object and c is the speed of light
(c=300000 km/s). For example the Schwarzschild radius for the Sun’s mass is around 3
kilometers, for the Earth’s mass is around 1cm and for a human body’s mass is million of times
smaller than a nucleus radius.

The existence of black holes was predicted by General Relativity (G.R.), theory proposed by Albert
Einsten in 1915. But, those have been studied from the decade of 60’s. There are many advances on
the explanatory theory of black holes, the most recent of them is the Hawking radiation, that
proposes the disintegration of black holes.

Observationally, we can’t receive any information from the black holes but we can study their effect
over surrounding objects. For example, in the center of the Milky Way we have been detected a
black hole due to the the highly elliptically trajectory of some stars. Another well studied effect is
the extra-galactic jets precedent from A.G.N. (Active Galaxy Nucleus), which is a compact region
at the center of a galaxy that has a much higher than normal luminosity, with characteristics
indicating that the excess luminosity is not produced by stars but for matter accelerated to
relativistic velocities in the surroundings of black holes.