Brief description on black holes

A black hole is a place in space where gravity pulls so much that even light can not get out. The gravity is so strong because matter has been squeezed into a tiny space. This can happen when a star is dying.The theory of general relativity predicts that a sufficiently compact mass can deform space-time to form a black hole.The boundary of the region from which no escape is possible is called the event horizon. Although the event horizon has an enormous effect on the fate and circumstances of an object crossing it, no locally detectable features appear to be observed. In many ways a black hole acts like an ideal black body, as it reflects no light. Moreover, quantum field theory in curved space-time predicts that event horizons emit Hawking radiation, with the same spectrum as a black body of a temperature inversely proportional to its mass. This temperature is on the order of billionths of a kelvin for black holes of stellar mass, making it essentially impossible to observe.

Types of Black Holes: 

• Steller black holes: When a star burns through the last of its fuel, it may find itself collapsing. For smaller stars, up to about three times the sun's mass, the new core will be a neutron star or a white dwarf. But when a larger star collapses, it continues to fall in on itself to create a stellar black hole.
• Supermassive black holes: Supermassive black holes are millions or even billions of times as massive as the sun, but have a radius similar to that of Earth's closest star. Such black holes are thought to lie at the center of pretty much every galaxy, including the Milky Way.Scientists aren't certain how such large black holes spawn. Once they've formed, they can easily gather mass from the dust and gas around them, material that is plentiful in the center of galaxies, allowing them to grow to enormous sizes.
• Intermediate black holes:  Scientists once thought black holes came in only small and large sizes, but recent research has revealed the possibility for the existence of midsize, or intermediate, black holes. Such bodies could form when stars in a cluster collide in a chain reaction. Several of these forming in the same region could eventually fall together in the center of a galaxy and create a supermassive black hole.

Singularity : A gravitational singularity or space-time singularity is a location in space-time where the gravitational field of a celestial body becomes infinite in a way that does not depend on the coordinate system. The quantities used to measure gravitational field strength become infinite within the singularity, the laws of normal space-time cannot exist.

At the center of a black hole, as described by general relativity, lies a gravitational singularity, a region where the space-time curvature becomes infinite. For a non-rotating black hole, this region takes the shape of a single point and for a rotating black hole, it is smeared out to form a ring singularity that lies in the plane of rotation. In both cases, the singular region has zero volume.

Observers falling into a Schwarzschild black hole (i.e., non-rotating and not charged) cannot avoid being carried into the singularity, once they cross the event horizon. They can prolong the experience by accelerating away to slow their descent, but only up to a limit; after attaining a certain ideal velocity, it is best to free fall the rest of the way.When they reach the singularity, they are crushed to infinite density and their mass is added to the total of the black hole. Before that happens, they will have been torn apart by the growing tidal forces in a process sometimes referred to as  the "noodle effect".

Some paradoxes that arise from current understanding of black holes:

• Entropy and thermodynamics.
• Information loss paradox.
• Firewall paradox.

references:

• wikipedia
• NASA