24.5 Black holes  (Page 3/10)

Imagine a future spacecraft foolish enough to land on the surface of a massive star just as it begins to collapse in the way we have been describing. Perhaps the captain is asleep at the gravity meter, and before the crew can say “Albert Einstein,” they have collapsed with the star inside the event horizon. Frantically, they send an escape pod straight outward. But paths outward twist around to become paths inward, and the pod turns around and falls toward the center of the black hole. They send a radio message to their loved ones, bidding good-bye. But radio waves, like light, must travel through spacetime, and curved spacetime allows nothing to get out. Their final message remains unheard. Events inside the event horizon can never again affect events outside it.

The characteristics of an event horizon were first worked out by astronomer and mathematician Karl Schwarzschild ( [link] ). A member of the German army in World War I, he died in 1916 of an illness he contracted while doing artillery shell calculations on the Russian front. His paper on the theory of event horizons was among the last things he finished as he was dying; it was the first exact solution to Einstein’s equations of general relativity. The radius of the event horizon is called the Schwarzschild radius in his memory.

Karl schwarzschild (1873–1916).

The event horizon    is the boundary of the black hole    ; calculations show that it does not get smaller once the whole star has collapsed inside it. It is the region that separates the things trapped inside it from the rest of the universe. Anything coming from the outside is also trapped once it comes inside the event horizon. The horizon’s size turns out to depend only on the mass inside it. If the Sun, with its mass of 1 M _Sun , were to become a black hole (fortunately, it can’t—this is just a thought experiment), the Schwarzschild radius would be about 3 kilometers; thus, the entire black hole would be about one-third the size of a neutron star of that same mass. Feed the black hole some mass, and the horizon will grow—but not very much. Doubling the mass will make the black hole 6 kilometers in radius, still very tiny on the cosmic scale.

The event horizons of more massive black holes have larger radii. For example, if a globular cluster of 100,000 stars (solar masses) could collapse to a black hole, it would be 300,000 kilometers in radius, a little less than half the radius of the Sun. If the entire Galaxy could collapse to a black hole, it would be only about 10 ¹² kilometers in radius—about a tenth of a light year. Smaller masses have correspondingly smaller horizons: for Earth to become a black hole, it would have to be compressed to a radius of only 1 centimeter—less than the size of a grape. A typical asteroid, if crushed to a small enough size to be a black hole, would have the dimensions of an atomic nucleus.