Black holes
According to general relativity, a black hole is a region of astronomical space from which nothing โ not particles and not even light โ can escape. This is the result of an extreme distortion of spacetime that occurs here, due to the gravity of a very compact enormous mass.
Around a black hole there is an imaginary surface that acts as a boundary, the so-called event horizon. Just outside this event horizon, light can just escape the enormous gravity. According to quantum field theory, the event horizon is the place where hawking radiation is formed.
Black holes are formed when very massive stars collapse at the end of their lives. After the black hole forms, it usually increases in size by absorbing matter from its surroundings. When a black hole merges with other black holes, it can create a supermassive black hole with a mass of billions of solar masses (Mโ). Most galaxies are believed to have a supermassive black hole at their center.
The presence of a black hole can be deduced from its interaction with other matter and with electromagnetic radiation such as visible light. For example, matter moving past a black hole can be scattered into a characteristic accretion disk. Stars orbiting a black hole are also possible clues: their orbit can be used to determine the mass and location of the black hole.
Breach through the event horizon
Characteristic of a black hole is its event horizon - the boundary in space-time that acts like a valve for light and matter: they can only pass through from the outside in. Observation of what happens within the event horizon is therefore impossible from the outside. Also, no signal can be sent outside from inside the black hole.
General relativity predicts that a large mass distorts space-time to such an extent that objects within the event horizon can only fall towards the black hole
For an observer far from a black hole, clocks closer to a black hole run slower. Due to this gravitational time dilation, an object falling towards a black hole appears to be moving slower and slower. Other processes also appear to be slowed down: emitted light has a smaller frequency and, in addition to attenuation, exhibits gravitational redshift. Just before the object reaches the event horizon, the light becomes so weak that it can no longer be seen from outside the event horizon. From within the event horizon, the incident light source was and remained in principle always visible, because light can always enter from outside the event horizon.
But for an observer who is incident himself, these effects do not occur: his or her clock continues to move at the same speed and after a finite time the event horizon is reached, although its location cannot be observed locally.However, the observer would be "stretched" into a long string ("spaghettification") by the extremely large gradient of the gravitational field in the vicinity of the black hole.
When the black hole is not rotating, the event horizon is spherical and lies at a distance of the Schwarzschild radius from the center of the black hole.