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The Black Hole, A Region Of Spacetime

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The black hole, a region of spacetime thats gravity is so strong that can prevent anything from escaping, even light. Contrary to popular belief, black holes are not empty holes in space, but rather a massive amount of matter packed into a small area. The graphic to the right shows the simulated view of a black hole in front of a Large Magellanic Cloud. The theory of these black holes was conceived in Einstein’s theory of general relativity. It predicts that a plentiful compact mass will contort spacetime and create a black hole. The area where the nothing can escape is called the event horizon. It has no basic features, and it acts like a perfect black body, in the sense that it reflects no light. Also, according to the to quantum field …show more content…

The graphic to the left shows the supermassive black hole in the Milky Way, Sagittarius A*.
Black holes have quite the history, and the idea of them has been around for longer than you may think. An object thats gravitational fields are too strong for anything, even light, to escape was first thought of in the 18th century. John Michell first wrote about a massive body with these features in a letter to Henry Cavendish of the Royal Society in 1783. The letter says:
In the year 1796, French mathematician Pierre-Simon Laplace had the same thoughts in the first and second editions of his book Exposition du système du Monde. What he had called “dark stars” were ignored in the 19th century, because the idea that light was affected by gravity was unfathomable.
In 1915, the great German mathematician, Albert Einstein, developed his own theory of general relativity. This showed that gravity does in fact influence light’s motion. Within a few months of releasing his theory, Karl Schwarzschild had found the solution to Einstein’s equations. The solution describes the gravitational field of a point mass and of a spherical mass. A couple months after Schwarzschild 's discoveries, Johannes Droste had by himself given the same solution, but had written more extensively on its properties. In the year of 1931, the Indian astrophysicist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar used special relativity to calculate that a non-rotating body of electron degenerate matter above the

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