Karl Schwarzschild lived an interesting life.  He served in the German army during WWI.  The Army took him to many forgien lands, such as Belgium, France, and Russia.  During his time in Russia Schwarzschild contratcted the fatal diseaese pemphigus.  Before he died he did mange to send out his sciencitific research.

    Schwarzschild had a fasination with what would happen if gravity, around a spherical body, became so infinatly powerful.  He was detrimined to find the least complex answer.  Although he never found out, his research helped find his answer, the black hole.  The final result was named after him.  The Schwazschild Solution.  It desrcibes a black hole as being an object so dense that light itself could not escape from it’s surface.

    Black holes are believed to be the final stage in the decay of a massive star.  It happens when nuclear fuel is exhausted form the stars core.   At the black holes center is a singularity.  That is the remains of the star that was crushed, to the point of infinate density.  The "surface" of a black hole is an invisable sphere within which the gravity is so great no light can escape.  This is also know as the event horizon.  The light entering the event horzon is heavily reddened, by the gravitatiuonal red shift, before it disappears into the balck hole.  While light on the outside of it is bended by the gravity.  As though it went through a lense,  but it does not fall into the black hole.

 That is enough about all the sciencetific stuff.  Here is a poem I found inspired by the phenominium that is the black hole.

    Black Hole
Observed as a black hole, I am
Sitting blatantly in nothing ness.
Accretion is all I know.
People try to define me, and my purpose.
Yet I leave them in my mystification.
Nothing escapes from me or eases in existence.
  -Daniel-
 

    Now back to some more science stuff.  This is a Hubble Space Telescope image.  The white area is the core center.  In the core is b brown sprial shaped object.  This object is about as large as our solar system.  It is 1,200,000,000 times our sun.  That means that gravity is about a million times stronger than that of our sun.  So this object is almost certainly a black hole.

Bibliography

Cambridge Relativity,   www.amtp.cam.ac.uk/user/gr/public/bh_home.html

Great Sciencetific Achievements,  The Twenith Century   Salem Press, Inc.   Pasadena, Ca. 1994

Ridpath, Ian   Astronomy   Gallery Books New York City, NY. 1991