The year 2019 begun with an astronomic news that goes around the world regarding the first image of a black hole. However, what is a black hole? A second question: Black holes, has never seen before?
Let start with the first question. A black hole is the result of a supernova, a star so massive that his gravity made it sink under herself. Then, the next consideration arouses, if the Universe have three dimensions, wide, length and deep (x, y, and z), so where do something of three dimensions that sank go? Another sub-deep (z’)? Moreover, these stars penetrate the Universe…
Let reconsider… Stars like our Sun are huge balls of gases mainly hydrogen and helium which are the simplest elements in the Universe. They burn these fuels troughs the nuclear fusion process, which is no more than thermonuclear explosions that fuse those atoms. In this process the products are gigantic amounts of electromagnetic energy (light), heat and other, more complex atoms like boron and carbon. As the stellar fuel were consume in several millions of years, all the hydrogen and helium are exhausted, so heaviest elements begun to melt. And so on iteratively into iron, magnesium and calcium, until reach extra heavy elements like gold.
For those who do not known, all the chemical elements were produce in the stars. Certainly, is the origin of these atoms. However, this solar kitchen has an end, which could be pacific or violent depending on the mass. Our Sun is one of these gentle giants, his mass is the average to live thousands of millions years. Almost in 5,000 million years the Sun will expand until reach the Earth’s orbit and then shrinking as a white dwarf star like a small planet size as our own producing much less energy than today.
Other more massive stars, as much as 1.4 times (Chandrasekhar limit) the mass of our Sun, have much less short life. His process of burning elements is greater, generating extra heavy elements faster. This unbalance process has a dangerous cost. The heavy elements generate more mass that increase the gravitational field, making that stellar expansion for burning outer layers would be lower than the attraction to the center. In few million years these stars could explode like Novas (new stars) liberating the outer layers to the surrounding space and looking like the Crab nebula (NGS1952), but the sunken rest will be a Neutron star. A spoon of this star will weight like a mountain. The only light that will escape this intense gravity are shots of energy as an ultra-rapid lighthouse resulting in a Pulsar star.
Supernovas are much more violent explosions that also liberate all these layers but with much more energy than pulsars. What remains in the center is… we do not know exactly, but we called Black holes. All the mass will sink over herself penetrating the Universe to maybe another universe or other point in the space or disappearing from existence. Cosmologist believe that time will slow near the border of the black holes (we call this frontier, the Event Horizon), and time stop inside them. All the objects near them, even the light, will be suck with no escape, so the black holes are invisibles.
After the father of the idea and formulas of gravity, Sir Isaac Newton (1643-1727), was the German physic Albert Einstein (1879-1955) who calculated how light is attracted by our Sun. During eclipses, detailed studies revealed the way light bend near the gravity. Afterword, another British physic Sir Stephen Hawking (1942-2018) stablished that in the Event Horizon of the black holes huge amounts of radiations like X and gamma rays occurs so this phenomenon are detectable, so the position of black holes are predictable. This was the clue to respond our second question, how to see a black hole. The young American astronomer Katie Bouman (1989- ) formulated and algorithm in order to orient the search and made possible to see the unseen.