[Bloody Sam Roberts]

I still don't understand black holes.

It's simple. Really. A star collapses and dies. It becomes, after a time, a super massive sphere. So massive that its gravitational pull will not allow light to escape. So all this light has to go somewhere...or rather, its energy. So the light is converted to other forms of energy...because we know that energy can not be destroyed but must be converted to some other form.

So the energy from this light is pulled in and gets converted to X-rays and other forms of higher frequency radiation like gamma rays. These, the 'black hole', cannot pull in so they spew out at very high speed and for great distances.

The name 'black hole' (which I detest) is an abysmal moniker for there is no hole. Yes, physical laws would seem to break down but there is no hole. It is nothing more that a super dense singularity that converts energy from one for to another on a MASSIVE scale.

See?

[Ditter]

thank you, that makes it PERFECTLY clear! ?:[

will there be a test on this later?

[FredZarguna]

The name 'black hole' (which I detest) is an abysmal moniker for there is no hole.

The name is actually a fairly good one. It is black -- in General Relativity it is really black. When you apply a mixed kind of GR + Quantum Mechanics it's a very very dark brown. But like the t-shirt says, it's as black as anything gets in our universe.

Is it a hole? Well, no, but again, it sure looks pretty much like one. In terms of spacetime, spacetime curves right down to the singularity, the Ricci scalar goes to infinity and the curvature tensor blows up and anything that goes inside r < 2GM will fall right into the singularity. So although there is no "hole" like a hole in a fabric, or a doughnut, it is very much like an extremely deep "hole" in the ground.

I think the name's OK; and it aggravates dumb@ss racists, which is a bonus: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oc1zGRUPztc

[steve86]

" So all this light has to go somewhere...or rather, its energy. So the light is converted to other forms of energy...So the energy from this light is pulled in and gets converted to X-rays and other forms of higher frequency radiation like gamma rays."

The X-rays are caused by matter from a binary companion, interstellar gas, etc., getting drawn into the compact object (wiki: The infalling matter releases gravitational potential energy, up to several tenths of its rest mass, as X-rays). That is where the vast amounts of energy in the X-Ray emission comes from.