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Perhaps instead they [black holes] might be found in the centres of galaxies. Horizon: Here Be Monsters, BBC 1993
In March 2000 two astronomers made an extraordinary discovery. One that is set to overturn our understanding of how the universe formed. What they discovered was a very simple relationship – a relationship between the galaxy we live in and the most destructive force in the universe – a super-massive black hole; it set the world of cosmology alight. Horizon: Super-Massive Black Holes, BBC 2000
Super-massive black holes could exist in two states: when it’s feeding, a giant black hole creates a bright burning gas disk around it. And then for some reason it stops feeding, leaving a dark deadly core lurking menacingly in the centre of the galaxy. ibid.
Perhaps black holes are an essential part of what galaxies are and how they work. ibid.
The size of the black hole in the end depends on how fast the stars are moving in the newly formed galaxy around it ... All giant black holes and their galaxies are connected from birth. ibid.
If our black hole has started feeding again, could this affect the Earth? ibid.
Every time we see a gamma-ray burst we are witnessing the death cry of a massive star and the birth of a black hole. Horizon: The Death Star, BBC 2001
What if the world is so strange we could never hope to understand it. And science was wasting its time trying to do so. It sounds like the sort of thing a mystic might say. But this was a suggestion made three decades ago by the most famous scientist in the world – Stephen Hawking. Horizon: The Hawking Paradox, BBC 2005
After thirty years of debate Stephen Hawking’s legacy is being called into question as never before. This is the story of his most controversial theory and perhaps his greatest mistake. ibid.
The doubts about Hawking have recently crystalised around an idea he proposed over thirty years ago. He called it the Information Paradox. It is an idea that has provoked one of the great intellectual battles of recent times. Between the most famous scientist in the world and those determined to prove him wrong. ibid.
Bits of the universe were disappearing ... Hawking was saying that a black hole would eventually disappear. ibid.
The Information Paradox, according to Susskind, was solved. Now across the world physicists raced to confirm it. Finally after ten years and hundreds of attempts a paper emerged that vindicated Susskind. ibid.
Hawking’s speech turned out to be one of the great U-turns of science. For information he now admitted was not lost in black holes after all. The idea he had defended for thirty years had been wrong all along. ibid.
It now appears that there is a supermassive black hole at the centre of almost every galaxy. And it could be that these black holes aren’t simply agents of destruction because scientists have discovered a unique relationship they share with their parent galaxy. Horizon: Who’s Afraid of a Big Black Hole? BBC 2009
Black holes are the most terrifying places in the universe. Created when a giant star dies, at their hearts is a point of infinite gravity so powerful nothing can escape it, not even light. Horizon: What is Reality? BBC 2011
Hawking’s revelation was that black holes instead of lasting for ever as everyone thought eventually disappear. Leaving no trace of anything. Including what Physics consider a fundamental part of reality: information .... Information can never be destroyed. ibid.
Lenny [Susskind] realised that if black holes were like holograms, then there is only one place where their information can be stored: the Event Horizon. Which would mean it would never fall in, and it would never be destroyed. ibid.
Perhaps the strangest of all are black holes. They are an exit place from the universe. Horizon: Swallowed by a Black Hole, BBC 2013
How something so small could be so bright. What could possibly produce such a mind-bending source of power? ibid.
Lynden-Bell: Inside the centre of every large galaxy in the universe lurks a supermassive black hole. ibid.
A feeding black hole is anything but black. ibid.
Quasars are nothing less than feeding, supermassive black holes. ibid.
Penrose had shown the bits of the universe could be sucked into a singularity, a tiny plughole at the centre of a black hole. Hawking took Penrose’s equations and reversed them, like running a film backwards. Where Penrose showed the universe disappearing into a black hole, Hawkins showed it came from one. Stephen Hawking, Master of the Universe, Channel 4 2008
Hawking knew that every object in the universe could be heated up or cooled down. But black holes were different. Heat would never get out of a black hole it seemed. This started to niggle Hawking. But it would turn out to be the key to the mystery of creation ... But what Hawking had glimpsed was a point where the two [theories] must clash: at the very edge of a black hole. ibid.
Hawking asked, What would happen if this pair of particles bumped up against a black hole? Hawking realised that the positive particle would have just enough energy to escape the black hole, but the particle with negative mass would fall in ... They decrease the mass of the black hole. ibid.
Black holes now seem to be where it all happens. They’re the engines that rip up the cosmos and create new stars and jets of energy and matter. ibid.
[Roger] Penrose’s theorem had shown that any collapsing star must end in a singularity. Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time p56
There was, however, a different interpretation of [Werner] Israel’s result, which was advocated by Roger Penrose and John Wheeler in particular. They argued that the rapid movements involved in a star’s collapse would mean that the gravitational waves it gave off would make it ever more spherical. According to this view, any non-rotating star, however complicated its shape and internal structure, would end up after gravitational collapse as a perfectly spherical black hole, whose size would depend only on its mass. Further calculations supported this view, and it soon came to be adopted generally. ibid. pp100-101
These ‘Kerr’ black holes rotate at a constant rate, their size and shape depending only on their mass and rate of rotation. If the rotation is zero, the black hole is perfectly round and the solution is identical to the Schwarzschild solution. If the rotation is non-zero, the black hole bulges outward near its equator. ibid. p101
This non-decreasing property of the event horizon’s area placed an important restriction on the possible behaviour of black holes. ibid. p111
A black hole ought to emit particles and radiation as if it were a hot body with a temperature that depends only on the black hole’s mass: the higher the mass, the lower the temperature. ibid. p115
The existence of radiation from black holes seems to imply that gravitational collapse is not as final and irreversible as we once thought. If an astronaut falls into a black hole, its mass will increase, but eventually the energy equivalent of that extra mass will be returned to the universe in the form of radiation. ibid. p124
According to the Big Bang theory all the universe suddenly sprang from a point of nothing. Could black holes be the key to explain how this happened? ... Instead of sucking everything in, a reverse black hole explodes out in a shower of Space, Matter and Time. Exactly as the Big Bang theory predicts. Stephen Hawking
A black hole by definition is a place where gravity is so great it engulfs everything around it. Stephen Hawking’s Universe: Black Holes & Beyond, BBC 2002
Wheeler had another agenda in embracing the unlikely premise of black holes. Quasars had become a nagging mystery. Could it be he wondered that one phenomenon could explain another? ibid.
Both the Big Bang and black holes will contain singularities, places where Space and Time come to an end and the laws of physics break down. Black holes it seems are cauldrons of staggering energy. In black holes they can consume everything in their path. ibid.
Particles can travel faster than light and can escape from a black hole. Other people call this Hawking Radiation. ibid.
The smaller ones have around four times the mass of our sun and are fifteen miles in diameter. Some are much larger containing the mass of thousands of suns. And then there are the really big ones. Super-massive black holes that exist at the centres of galaxies like our own. Stephen Hawking’s Universe: Into the Universe
The negative particle is pulled into the black hole. But the positive particle has just enough energy to avoid getting sucked in. It is released as a particle of radiation. Stephen Hawking
Consideration of particle emission from black holes would seem to suggest that God not only plays dice, but also sometimes throws them where they cannot be seen. Stephen Hawking, Scientific American 1977