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Question

What are the components of the a black hole in the universe?How are they formed? What happens if a rocket, often lost its destination and enters the black hole?

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Solution

There are three main parts to a black hole.

  • Singularity.
  • Outer Event Horizon.
  • Inner Event Horizon. The Singularity is the very center of a black hole. It is where the gravity is the strongest. Singularity is just a big word that means "squashed up star". The Outer Event Horizon is the very outer layer.
black hole An extremely dense celestial object that has a gravitational field so strong that nothing can escape, not even light. A black hole is formed by the collapse of a massive star's core in a supernova. See more at star.

Suppose that, possessing a proper spacecraft and a self-destructive urge, I decide to go black-hole jumping and head for an uncharged, nonrotating ("Schwarzschild") black hole. In this and other kinds of hole, I won't, before I fall in, be able to see anything within the event horizon. But there's nothing locally special about the event horizon; when I get there it won't seem like a particularly unusual place, except that I will see strange optical distortions of the sky around me from all the bending of light that goes on. But as soon as I fall through, I'm doomed. No bungee will help me, since bungees can't keep Sunday from turning into Monday. I have to hit the singularity eventually, and before I get there there will be enormous tidal forces—forces due to the curvature of spacetime—which will squash me and my spaceship in some directions and stretch them in another until I look like a piece of spaghetti. At the singularity all of present physics is mute as to what will happen, but I won't care. I'll be dead.

For ordinary black holes of a few solar masses, there are actually large tidal forces well outside the event horizon, so I probably wouldn't even make it into the hole alive and unstretched. For a black hole of 8 solar masses, for instance, the value of r at which tides become fatal is about 400 km, and the Schwarzschild radius is just 24 km. But tidal stresses are proportional to M/r3. Therefore the fatal r goes as the cube root of the mass, whereas the Schwarzschild radius of the black hole is proportional to the mass. So for black holes larger than about 1000 solar masses I could probably fall in alive, and for still larger ones I might not even notice the tidal forces until I'm through the horizon and doomed.


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