Space Beauties
One of the many picture of what a black hole really looks like.
Black Holes
Black holes: a region of space where the gravitational field is so powerful that nothing, including light, can escape its pull. Black holes are formed when stars collapse. They collapse when the star doesn’t have enough “fuel” to maintain its temperature. If the temperature gets too low, then the star will collapse under its own weight.
The gravitational collapse of heavy stars us known to be the cause of most stellar mass black holes. Stellar mass black holes are formed when a star collapses and is observed as a supernova or a gamma ray burst.
Once a black hole is formed, it will continue to grow by absorbing matter. Black holes absorb interstellar dust, which doesn’t really affect the growth of the black hole. But when others stars or objects happen to collide with the black hole, it grows more than absorbing dust.
Supermassive black holes are suspected to be the center of most galaxies and are expected to have been formed from the coagulation of much smaller objects.
Objects orbit black holes like a plant and its moons. Even though astronomers cannot see the black holes themselves, they can tell where they are by looking at the orbiting stars and other matter that happens to be orbiting the black hole.
To determine the mass of a black hole, you would use quasi-periodic oscillations. The technique uses a relationship between the black holes and the inner part of their surrounding disks where the gas spins inward. As the gas spins inward, it radiates X-rays with an intensity that varies, depending on the black hole’s mass.
Worm Holes
Wormholes are when two black holes are connected to each other. Basically a ‘shortcut’ through space and time. Wormholes are described as having two mouths that are connected by a tube or throat.
One type of wormhole is called an intra-universe wormhole. This type of wormhole connects one location of a universe with another location of the same universe. Wormholes should be able to connect two distant locations to make a shortcut through space-time, allowing time travel faster.
Inter-universe wormholes connect one universe with another. Sometimes, these types of wormholes are called Schwarzschild wormholes. Some say that these types of wormholes can be used to travel from one parallel universe to another.
But the two main types of wormholes are Lorentzian and Euclidean wormholes. Lorentzian wormholes are studied in general relativity and semiclassical gravity and Euclidean wormholes are studied in particle physics. Transversable wormholes are special type of Lorentzian wormholes, which would allow humans to travel from on side of the wormhole to the other. Now if we could make a spaceship durable enough to make it through the travel, then we could explore the universe more than we ever have before.
Both black holes and wormholes are one of the beauties of our universe and shouldn’t be underestimated. They are two very different things but they still exist in the same universe.
