Blackholes explained

Blackholes are one of the strangest things in existence and we need to know more about it. Stars are incredibly massive collections of mostly hydrogen atoms that collapsed from enormous gas cloud under their own gravity. In their core, nuclear fusion crushes hydrogen atoms into helium releasing a tremendous amount of energy. This energy in the form of radiation pushes against gravity maintaining a delicate balance between the two forces. As long as there is fusion in the core a star remains stable enough. But stars with way more mass then our own sun he heats and pressure at the core allow them to fuse heavier elements until they reach iron.


Unlike all the elements that went before the fusion process that creates iron doesn't generate any energy. Iron builds up at the center of the star until it reaches a critical amount and the balance between radiation and gravity is suddenly broken the core collapses. Within a fraction of the second star implodes feeding even more mass into the core. It's at this very moment all the heavier elements in the universe are created as the star dies in a supernova explosion. This produces either a neutron star or if the star is massive enough the entire mass of the core collapses into a black hole.


The black holes do not suck things like a vacuum cleaner, if we were to swap the sun for an equally massive black hole, nothing much would change for earth except we would freeze to death. What would happen to you if you fell into a black hole? The experience of time is different around the black hole, from the outside you seem to slow down as you approach the event horizon, so time passes slower for you. While from your perspective you could watch the rest of the universe in fast forward, kind of like seeing into the future.


IF you enter a black hole how sooner you die is depends on the size of a black hole. A smaller black hole would kill you even enter its event horizon, while you probably could travel inside a supersize massive black hole for quite a while. As a rule of thumb the further away from the singularity you are the longer you live.


Black holes come in different sizes. There are stellar mass black holes with few times the mass of the sun, and the diameter of an asteroid. And then there are the supermassive black holes, which are found at the heart of every galaxy and have been feeding for billions of years. currently, the largest supermassive black hole known is S50014+81. 40 Billion times the mass of our sun. It is 236.7 billion kilometers in diameter which is 47 times the distance from the sun to Pluto.

As powerful black holes are they will eventually evaporate through a process called hawking radiation.