black hole1
An image of the core of the Whirlpool galaxy M51 taken by the Wide Field Planetary Camera onboard the Hubble Space Telescope. It shows an immense ring of dust and gas which is thought to surround and hide a giant black hole, 1 million times the mass of the Sun, in the center of the galaxy. The ring forms an accretion disc of gas, about 100 light years across, falling toward the black hole. The two brighter areas perpendicular to the widest dark lane are two jets of particles accelerated by the black hole. Anyone who has ever watched the launch of a rocket is familiar with the concept that escape from a gravitational field requires the expenditure of energy. The stronger the gravitational field, more energy is required to escape from its clutches. If the rocket has insufficient fuel, it will return to Earth and escape is impossible. Thus, it is not hard to imagine a gravitational field strong enough to prevent the escape of any object with a finite amount of energy. The gravitational force of an object is governed by a combination of the amount of matter it contains and its volume. The more the matter is confined in progressively smaller volume, the larger the gravitational field at the surface of the object.
As evolving stars exhaust the nuclear fuel which enables them to support their own weight and shine at the same time, they begin a rapid collapse. It is believed that the crushing self-gravity of the collapsing star may be sufficient to form a black hole with the mass of several times that of the Sun. Such black holes would have Schwarzschild radii of several to perhaps a few tens of kilometers. Considering their mass, they are really tiny things. If one were to replace the Sun with a black hole of the same mass as the Sun, there would be a region of space a few kilometers in size located where the center of the Sun currently resides where space would be extremely warped. However, the gravitational field of this object, measured at the distance of the Earth, would be exactly that of the present-day Sun. The Earth and planets would continue in their orbits and except for it being rather dark, the solar system would continue much as it does today. If one were to launch a rocket from the Earth to hit the black hole, the task would be immensely more difficult than hitting the Sun. The Sun presents a target nearly one and a half million kilometers across while the black hole would be more than one hundred thousand times smaller. This emphasizes just how difficult it is to feed matter into a black hole.
Some common words found in the essay are:
Ultraviolet Explorer, Karl Schwarzschild, Space Telescope, Simon Laplace, Normally Schwarzschild, black hole, Sun Earth, Sun Sun, Binary System, , mass sun, gravitational field, massive object, black holes, light beam, times mass sun, times mass, Hubble Space, hubble space telescope, light escape, sun black, mass times, black hole mass, black hole center, field strong prevent,
Approximate Word count = 1875
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page double spaced)
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