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| Black Hole |
What
are black holes? Black holes are still to some degree a puzzle to us, anyway
that may not generally be the situation. What we can be sure of is, that
they're quite alarming and our cosmic system alone is thought to contain at any
rate 100 million of them. Black holes are wandering around our cosmichood.
Their gravity is so dense that they are not stuck in orbit of another object.
They also don’t emit any light or radiation so you can’t see them, making it
hard to know exactly where they are.
We can, however, see the holes effect on near by
matter. Unless there is a lot of nearby matter, black holes can sneak around
undetected. There are two types of black holes; super massive black holes which
are at the heart of every galaxy, and stellar mass black holes, which are the
ones that can really creep up on you.
The
nearest stellar mass black hole we know of is thought to be just under 3
thousand light years away and is about 9 times the mass of our sun. So what is
a black hole exactly and why would it matter if we got close to one? Black
holes are very very dense. They’re so heavy, that they start to bend space and
time, inwards. Obviously, if they’re able to bend space,black holes are denser
than our sun, which means if one came close to earth, the gravitational pull of
our solar system would shift… meaning planets would be torn from orbit and
likely smash into one another. If we were able to avoid any planet smashing,we
would quickly discover that earth has become a dart board for asteroids.
Asteroids orbit too, and as much smaller rocks,they would easily be torn from
their current paths and hurled towards Earth. This would not be ideal, as this
could cause wide spread death and destruction, and possibly a number of fires.
If we, by some chance, managed to survive that, this next part would assure an
end to humanity. As we were drawn closer to the black hole,our atmosphere would
be torn away and sucked in, then parts of the planet would break up itself.
Also, the radiation created from all the other broken apart material from other
planets and cosmic junk would be very, very intense.
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| Black Hole in Milky Way |
What happens when we cross the event horizon and start travelling into that hole. Well, honestly, we don’t know, but thereare some key theories out there.
The
first is of spaghettification. Some scientists think that at the bottom of a
black hole is a point of singularity. Our earth would be broken apart, molecule
by molecule, in a funnel effect leading down to this dense point of
singularity. We would be stretched out like spaghetti,so thin that we would
exist atom on top of atom.
Others theories that black holes are not
holes,but doors to the other side of the universe. As black holes already bend
time and space, many think they’re folds in time and space and that matter
comes out of the other side and expands outwards…like a big bang.
We
know that our universe is expanding, wecan see it. We know that it started in a
very hot, dense place and exploded outwards. Could we have come out of a black
hole? Another theory is that, if earth fell in toa black hole, we wouldn’t even
notice. Some scientists believe that instead of being destroyed, any material
that touches a black hole turns into a near perfect hologram. So far as we are
aware and can hypothesis,the only way to escape being sucked in by a black hole
is to travel faster than the speed of its gravitational pull, so faster than
the speed of light, which is something we are not even close to be able to
doing. Our solar system has been doing find for 4.5 billion years, which
suggests we have never come into contact with a blackhole yet, so we probably
shouldn’t worry too much. Scientists have created something called a Large
Hadron Collider, which smashes particles together and is thought to be able to
create a black hole. This collider cost billions of dollars and is designed to
help us understand particle physics and the origins of the universe. … but it
could be powerful enough to generate a miniature black hole.
