Don’t be fooled by the name: a black hole isn’t just empty space. Rather, it’s a vast amount of matter compressed into a small space – imagine a star 10 times more massive than the Sun crammed into a sphere the size of New York City. As a result, nothing, not even light, can escape the gravitational field. NASA instruments have created a fresh picture of these strange objects in recent years, which are considered by many to be the most fascinating entities in space.

For millennia, people have imagined an object in space that is so big and thick that light cannot escape it. Einstein’s theory of general relativity, which proved that when a large star dies, it leaves behind a small, dense remnant core, is most famous for predicting black holes. The equations demonstrated that if the core’s mass is greater than three times that of the Sun, gravity will override all other forces, resulting in a black hole.

Telescopes that detect x-rays, light, or other forms of electromagnetic radiation cannot directly observe black holes. However, we can deduce the existence of black holes and study them by observing their effects on adjacent matter. If a black hole passes through a cloud of interstellar matter, for example, it will accrete matter. If a normal star approaches close enough to a black hole, a similar scenario can occur. In this situation, as it pushes the star closer to itself, the black hole has the potential to break it apart. As the attracted matter speeds up and warms up, x-rays are emitted into space. Moreover, recent discoveries provide compelling evidence that black holes have a profound impact on their surroundings, generating intense gamma ray bursts, eating neighboring stars, and playing a large role in the creation of new stars in some locations while halting it in others.

The death of a star and the beginning of a black hole

The remnants of a massive star that dies in a supernova explosion form the majority of black holes in our universe. (Smaller stars decay into dense neutron stars, which lack the mass to confine light.) It can be demonstrated theoretically that no force can protect a star from collapsing under the force of gravity if the entire mass of the star is great enough (about three times the mass of the Sun). However, something unexpected happens when the star collapses. As the star’s surface approaches an imaginary surface known as the “event horizon,” time on the star slows in comparison to time measured by observers far away. When the surface of the star reaches the event horizon, time stops and the star can no longer collapse – it is merely a frozen entity in space.

Collisions between stars can produce even larger black holes. The strong, transient flashes of light known as gamma ray bursts were first spotted by NASA’s Swift telescope shortly after its launch in December 2004. After collecting data from the event’s “afterglow” with Chandra and NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, researchers concluded that enormous explosions can occur when a black hole and a neutron star meet, forming another black hole.

The sheer size of black holes

Although the basic formation process is well studied and documented, one persistent mystery in black hole research is that they appear to exist on two dramatically different scales. On one hand, there are innumerable black holes formed by the collapse of huge stars. These “stellar mass” black holes are 10 to 24 times as massive as the Sun and can be found all around the Universe. When another star gets close enough to the black hole’s gravity, some of the matter around it is snared, causing x-rays to be emitted. The majority of galactic black holes, however, are extremely difficult to detect. Models estimate that there are as many as ten million to a billion such black holes in the Milky Way alone, based on the number of stars massive enough to form them.

The “supermassive” black holes, which are millions, if not billions, of times as massive as the Sun, are on the other extreme of the size range. Supermassive black holes, according to astronomers, are found at the centre of nearly all major galaxies, including our own Milky Way. Astronomers can spot them by observing the effects they have on neighboring stars and gas.

Astronomers have long held the belief that no mid-sized black holes exist, but r ecent data from Chandra, XMM-Newton, and Hubble, on the other hand, strengthens the case for the existence of mid-sized black holes. A chain reaction of star collisions in compact star clusters leads to the production of extremely massive stars, which eventually collapse to generate intermediate-mass black holes, according to one theory. After then, the star clusters descend to the galaxy’s centre, where the intermediate-mass black holes merge to produce a supermassive black hole.

Be it a baby black-hole or a giant one, these fantastic freely occurring galactic phenomena are still something that modern science needs to understand completely. The fact is that most fascinating things of science take the most time to completely grasp.