Jarnstead/Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences annotations by E. Once a black hole forms, the particle contents that led to its formation become completely unimportant within General Relativity. One of the most important contributions of Roger Penrose to black hole physics is the demonstration of how a realistic object in our Universe, such as a star (or any collection of matter), can form an event horizon and how all the matter bound to it will inevitably encounter the central singularity. And for better or worse there’s a limit to how quickly anything can move within our Universe: the speed of light in a vacuum.
Dial up the amount of mass, and it becomes harder and harder to escape you’ll have to move even faster in order to do so. If you put a sufficient amount of mass together in a small enough volume of space, the gravitational pull within that region will prevent anything below a certain speed from escaping. ( Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center)Īccording to Einstein’s General Relativity, black holes don’t particularly care what they are made out of. The supermassive ones remain out of reach until a longer baseline gravitational wave detector is established, while pulsar timing arrays are capable of picking up even longer-wavelength and more exotic signals. Although we’ve detected many pairs of black holes through gravitational waves, they’re all restricted to black holes of ~200 solar masses or below, and to black holes that formed from matter. This simulation shows the radiation emitted from a binary black hole system.