Black holes Research Paper Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words

Black holes - Research Paper Example 1). The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has explicitly disclosed that black holes happen when stars die and create a void or place in space where gravity allegedly is so strong that everything it comes into contact with is pulled in – even light (NASA, 2008). The current discourse hereby aims to present crucial information about black holes and the scientific theories behind them. The term black hole was reportedly coined by John Wheeler, noted to be a Princeton physicist, in 1967 (NASA, 2013). It was commendable for Hawking to aver that the theory behind black holes had originated way back 200 years ago through a paper allegedly written in 1783 by John Michelle from Cambridge who documented ‘black stars’ in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London (Hawking, n.d.). The description of the observation was analogous to how black holes are described in contemporary times, to wit: â€Å"a star that was sufficiently massive and compact, would have such a strong gravitational field that light could not escape. Any light emitted from the surface of the star, would be dragged back by the stars gravitational attraction, before it could get very far. Michell suggested that there might be a large number of stars like this† (Hawking, n.d., par. 3). Another scientist whose name emerged as one of the pioneers in the study of black holes was a French scientist who was identified by Hawkin as Marquis de La~plass (Hawking, n.d.). However, only when Einstein allegedly came out with his famous General Theory of Relativity was the possibility of black holes actually confirmed. As expressly indicated, according to Einstein’s theory, â€Å"when a massive star dies, it leaves behind a small, dense remnant core. If the cores mass is more than about three times the mass of the Sun, the equations showed, the force of gravity overwhelms all other forces and produces a black hole† (NASA, 2013,