A black hole is the ultimate Hotel California - once you check in, you can never leave. The event horizon is the tipping point. Any object approaching closer than the event horizon is destined to meet the singularity inside the black hole. The spherical boundary, the event horizon depends upon the size of the black hole. The gravitation of a black hole is no stronger than its comparable mass of a normal star or object.
Black Hole FAQ tells that a black hole the mass of our sun would be only 4.3 miles in diameter. If the sun suddenly transformed into a black hole, the solar system would not be sucked into the black hole. Everything would continue orbiting something now very dark. The gravity inside the black hole is so intense that the escape velocity is greater than the speed of light. Since photons travel at the speed of light, they can never leave the black hole.
However, black holes do leak. Hawking radiation is a thermal radiation emitted by black holes. First described by Stephen Hawking, black holes have non-zero temperature and entropy. This means that they emit energy and can evaporate over googles of time.
'Ghost' Remains After Black Hole Eruption explains that the X-ray observatory Chandra has imaged the residual x-rays after a black hole emission. The black hole is over 10 billion light years away and the emission took place only 3 billion years after the formation of the universe. The ghost is shown in the picture below.
Credit: X-ray (NASA/CXC/IoA/A.Fabian et al.)
Chandra has imaged black hole eruptions before. Most powerful eruption in the universe describes an eruption imaged by the X-ray observatory in 2005. This eruption had been in process for 100 million years. Conjecture is that the black hole was swallowing more mass than it could absorb, so it ejected the mass before it was eternally captured.
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