Black Holes - black hole, event horizon, collapse, supermassive
Black Holes
black hole, event horizon, collapse, supermassive
Light Unit
What happens when a star dies? Something amazing! Something terrifying! It is something scientists are
still trying to explain. Our sun, which is just another star, pulls the Earth in with its gravity. In space, big
things pull in small things. Think of placing a big orange bowling ball in the center of a trampoline. This
will be the sun. Now, grab a tennis ball (this will be the Earth), and roll it around the edge of the trampoline
so it moves in circles. What happens? With each circle, the tennis ball gets closer and closer to the
bowling ball, right? That's what happens when the sun pulls in things flying through space. It bends the
invisible stuff in space and draws us in. So what happens when the sun that pulls us in breaks down?
The answer is it turns into a vacuum. A great sucking hole in space that eats everything that comes in its
path. You may know that light is the fastest thing we know of. Even light cannot escape the pulling power
of a black hole. Think of shining a flashlight and watching as the beam of light bends like lemonade being
sucked through a straw. A black hole is a thing in space that has so much gravity that everything nearby
is drawn into it, even light. How does a big burning star turn into a sucking vacuum?
Stars are like giant heaters. They make new gases, which let out a crazy amount of energy. The small
parts within the gas inside of the sun are crashing together to make a new gas and they are letting out a lot
of energy. After a very long time, they can run out of gas. When this happens, the star stops growing and
the force around it will begin to press in, crushing it like your foot coming down on an empty soda can.
When something collapses, it breaks down into something smaller than it was. The dying star gets
smaller and smaller, but all of the matter (which is just another word for stuff) inside of it, stays there. This
stuff just gets closer and closer together. This is bad news for anything around the star.
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Black Holes - black hole, event horizon, collapse, supermassive
Let us shrink the Earth to the size of a golf ball. It still weighs the same, which means it will still pull us in,
just like our Earth pulls us in now. Go ahead, try to jump away from it. Space cannot handle having
something so small, yet so heavy . . . If you think about the size of the sun and the planets that move
around it, think about how big something would have to be to keep a whole galaxy in one piece.
A supermassive black hole is the largest type of black hole, which has the mass of between a thousand
and up to billions of stars. We do not understand these giants yet, but I 'd stay away from them if I were
you!
If there is only a hole left, then where did that star go? It's gone! Most of the time, when something dies,
we have something left over, like fossils. Not so with stars. When a star disappears, it is an event. A
horizon is how far you can see on land or water. This is why the edge of a black hole is called the event
horizon; it is the point where all things stop happening, or at least, we cannot see them happen. Once
something passes through a black hole, be it a rock, a beam of light, or even a whole sun, it's gone for
good. As far as we know, nothing can escape.
Black holes are scary, powerful things. After a star dies, it becomes so heavy, it breaks through everything
we know and goes to an unknown place while sucking up anything that is around it. What lies beyond
everything we know and can see? To answer that question we would need to go inside a black hole. And
I don’t think that seems like a very good idea. Do you?
Resources:
"How Black Holes Work." How Stuff Works.Discovery, 2011.
<http://science.howstuffworks.com/dictionary/astronomy-terms/black-hole1.htm>
"Black Holes." Kids' Astronomy, 2008. <http://www.kidsastronomy.com/black_hole.htm>
"Supermassive Black Holes." Science Channel. Discovery, 2012.
<http://science.discovery.com/video-topics/space-videos/supermassive-black-holes-the-black-hole.htm>
Over 300 more free Science and History articles are waiting to inspire your students at BirdBrainScience.com
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