Black Hole

What is a Black Hole?

To me it is just a gigantic mass of energy that sor t of sucks anything it comes across into its core and gets destroyed.

Two centuries ago, the English geologist John Michell realized that it would be theoretically possible for gravity to be so overwhelmingly strong that nothing -- not even light traveling at 186,000 miles an hour -- could escape. To generate such gravity, an object would have to be very massive and unimaginably dense. At the time, the necessary conditions for "dark stars" (as Michell called them) seemed physically impossible. His ideas were published by the French mathematician and philosopher Pierre Simon Laplace in two successive editions of an astronomy guide, but were dropped from the third edition.

In 1916, the concept was revived when German astrophysicist Karl Schwarzschild decided to compute the gravitational fields of stars using Einstein's new field equation. Schwarzschild limited the complexity of the problem by assuming the star was perfectly spherical, gravitationally collapsed, and did not rotate. His calculations yielded a solution aptly called a Schwarzschild singularity.

Scientists theorize that a singularity lies at the center of a black hole, a catchy term physicist John Wheeler coined in the 1960s. Since then, black holes have caught the public imagination.

Astronomers have obtained an unprecedented look at the nearest example of galactic cannibalism -- a massive black hole hidden at the center of a nearby giant galaxy,Centaurus A,that is feeding on a smaller galaxy in a spectacular collision. Such fireworks were common in the early universe, as galaxies formed and evolved, but are rare today.

Astronomers have used NASA's Hubble Space Telescope to probe the core of the nearest active galaxy to Earth, Centaurus A, this is a picture of it throught the Hubble Space Telescope.

1847: Sir John Herschel was the first to report observations of what we now know as NGC 5128, or its radio name Centaurus A. In his "Outlines of Astronomy," published in 1849, Herschel described it as "two semi-ovals of elliptically formed nebula appearing to be cut asunder and separated by a broad obscure band parallel to the larger axis of the nebula, in the midst of which a faint streak of light parallel to the sides of the cut appears."