• Question: Do we need black holes?

    Asked by Izzyb to Helen on 14 Nov 2014.
    • Photo: Helen Johnson

      Helen Johnson answered on 14 Nov 2014:

      Hi Izzy 🙂 Great questions! You really got me thinking about this.
      I don’t think we ‘need’ black holes, but they play a huge part in determining the structure and fate of many galaxies. The supermassive black holes at the centre are sometimes ‘active’ – matter is falling in and the black hole is emitting lots of high energy radiation. This affects the galaxy’s ability to form stars. There are also huge black holes at the centre of galaxy clusters (very large groups of many galaxies).
      I think if we didn’t have black holes, then some galaxies may be much larger, and the Milky Way would be much more likely to live in a cluster.

      … if we didn’t have black holes then scifi writers wouldn’t have many movie plots, and Stephen Hawking would be out of a job 😉

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