• Question: what elements are black holes made of

    Asked by SPEC BOY to Christie, Dan, David, Dawn, Sian on 14 Jun 2016.
    • Photo: David Robertson

      David Robertson answered on 14 Jun 2016:

      Black holes can be made of pretty much anything, but you do need a lot of whatever it is and you do have to squash it a lot! Typically the smallest black holes are about twice as heavy as our sun, and the biggest are maybe a few million times the mass of our sun. There is one of these big black holes in the centre of our galaxy.

      If you want to make a small black hole from, for example, toy rabbits, get about one sun weight of toy rabbits (2000000000000000000000000000000kg) and squash them into a ball about 10km across – this will form a neutron star. Throw in another half suns weight of something and the whole thing will collapse into a black hole.

      DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME

      More usually black holes are formed when large stars, at least 10 times bigger than our sun, run out of energy and collapse. The core of these stars is mainly iron, so that is what usually starts black holes.

    • Photo: Dawn Lau

      Dawn Lau answered on 15 Jun 2016:

      Can’t top David’s answer. And that is a really fun thought experiment 🙂

    • Photo: Christie Waddington

      Christie Waddington answered on 17 Jun 2016:

      So black holes result from a whole bunch of matter that is packed into a very small area. This causes a gravitational field that is so strong, that not even particles or light can escape!

      There is something called the “singularity”, which is the centre of the black hole. We have no idea what this is made of! There is probably iron and hydrogen in the black hole, but we could never send a probe in to test this because as far as we know the gravity in there is so great that it has squashed everything to the point that it no longer exists.

    • Photo: Sian Thomas

      Sian Thomas answered on 20 Jun 2016:

      Great answers – particularly from Christie and David. Wondering about making black holes out of waste – because then you would have a good way of minimizing its impact. I love these mind games 🙂

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