Thursday, December 14, 2006

What if the Sun become a black hole?


The Sun will not become a black hole. Only stars that weigh considerably more than the Sun end their lives as black holes. The Sun appears to have been active for 4.6 billion years and has enough fuel to go on for another five billion years or so. At the end of its life, the Sun will start to fuse helium into heavier elements and begin to swell up, ultimately growing so large that it will swallow the Earth. After a billion years as a red giant, it will suddenly collapse into a white dwarf -- the final end product of a star like ours. It may take a trillion years to cool off completely. What if the Sun did become a black hole for some reason? The main effect is that it would get very dark and very cold around here. The Earth and the other planets would not get sucked into the black hole; they would keep on orbiting in exactly the same paths they follow right now. Why? Because the horizon of this black hole would be very small -- only about 3 kilometers -- as long as you stay well outside the horizon, Earth will not being sucked into the black hole.
For more details of the end of Sun,you can visit this interesting website :http://nrumiano.free.fr/Estars/fading.html

Tuesday, December 5, 2006

Will Black hole suck up EVERY matter in the Universe?

A black hole has a "horizon," which means a region from which you can't escape and 100% being sucked into it. If you cross the horizon, you're doomed to eventually hit the singularity. But as long as you stay outside of the horizon, you can avoid getting sucked in. In fact, to someone well outside of the horizon, the gravitational field surrounding a black hole is no different from the field surrounding any other object of the same mass. In other words, a one-solar-mass black hole is no better than any other one-solar-mass object (such as, for example, the Sun) at "sucking in" distant objects. So as long as we don't go near the black hole or cross the horizon, we will not being sucked into a black hole.

Monday, December 4, 2006

My Decision

It really took me a long time to decide on what topic to do for my physic project. A week ago, I decide to do the topic on Time Travel,but after doing the research,I found that the materials that I had found is too difficult for me to understand ,especially the theory of special relativity by Albert Einstein.So I had decided to change the topic to the topic on Black Hole for my physic project.

How black hole are formed?


Black holes are thought to form from stars or other massive objects if and when they collapse from their own gravity to form an object whose density is infinite: in other words, a singularity. During most of a star's lifetime, nuclear fusion in the core generates electromagnetic radiation, including photons, the particles of light. This radiation exerts an outward pressure that exactly balances the inward pull of gravity caused by the star's mass.
As the nuclear fuel is exhausted, the outward forces of radiation diminish, allowing the gravitation to compress the star inward. The contraction of the core causes its temperature to rise and allows remaining nuclear material to be used as fuel. The star is saved from further collapse -- but only for a while.
Eventually, all possible nuclear fuel is used up and the core collapses. How far it collapses, into what kind of object, and at what rate, is determined by the star's final mass and the remaining outward pressure that the burnt-up nuclear residue (largely iron) can muster. If the star is sufficiently massive or compressible, it may collapse to a black hole. If it is less massive or made of stiffer material, its fate is different: it may become a white dwarf or a neutron star.

From the website :http://archive.ncsa.uiuc.edu/Cyberia/NumRel/BlackHoleFormation.html