which type of star turns into a black hole

Which type of star turns into a black hole how to#

Figure 1 - The motion of stars around the center of the Milky Way Galaxy.

And not just any black hole, but a super-massive black hole. What object could produce the gravitational force of 4.5 million suns and not produce any light? A black hole. But, at that point in space, nothing was emitting any light. The stars were seen to orbit a point in space as if they were affected by the gravity of 4.5 million suns ( Figure 1). There, they found a group of stars and followed their movements for over a decade. 1 They developed instruments and methods to obtain a clear picture of what is going on at the heart of the Milky Way. Two scientists, Andrea Ghez and Reinhard Genzel, received the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics for looking that monster right in the face.

Not only because it requires piercing through interstellar “dust” that absorbs visible light, but also because there is a monster lurking there. It is not easy staring into the center of our galaxy, the Milky Way. In this article, we will discuss different ways we can “see” black holes, and particularly what we do and do not yet understand about stars getting “tidally disrupted” by them.

Which type of star turns into a black hole how to#

These star-destroying events can help us to discover the locations of the most massive black holes in the Universe, but only if we know how to find and interpret them. When stars get close to super-massive black holes they can be torn apart, which produces a relatively brief but informative flash of light. Black holes are the most densely packed objects in the Universe. But, in recent years, astronomers have developed a new way to investigate a type of invisible and distant objects-super-massive black holes. Studying invisible objects in space that are hundreds of millions of light years away may sound impossible.