Black Holes: Difference between revisions

However, you'd probably be long dead before that anyway as black holes come with some dangers attached due to the extremely intense gravity around them: First, you'll be spaghettified (this ''is'' the scientific term for it); the tidal forces of the black hole are so strong that, if you were going in feet first, your feet would feel a stronger attraction than your head and thus your body would stretch out (incidentally, this occurs in more applicable situations, such as returning space shuttles, as well - the difference is that the attraction difference is so minor that the astronauts do not stretch a measurable amount). The gravity exerted by black holes is so strong that it can even deform atoms. On the upside, the bigger a black hole is, the less drastic this effect becomes on its edge; in fact, for a supermassive black hole, an individual should survive at least past the event horizon. The second big danger is good old radiation, due to gravitational blueshifting. Any radiation hitting you from the outside would be blueshifted (given higher frequencies, and therefore energy, as opposed to redshifting, which decreases the frequency of electromagnetic radiation and therefore their energy) and thus a lot more dangerous, to the point that, [http://jila.colorado.edu/~ajsh/insidebh/realistic.html according to some simulations], it would be the thing that would kill you before you could reach the singularity, assuming a black hole big enough to neglect tidal effects. It's known as [http://discovermagazine.com/2011/jun/26-strange-physics-singular-views-inside-black-holes/article_view?b_start:int=2&-C= ''inflationary instability''] and, according to scientists, [[There Is No Kill Like Overkill|its effects would go very far beyond of just vaporizing your body.]]

 

 

In short: black holes are really, ''[[Mind Screw|really]]'' [[Eldritch Abomination|weird]]. It's speculated that there are supermassive black holes at the center of every galaxy and that they were there ''before'' the galaxies formed (rather than just have formed by a variety of small black holes merging into one -- yes, they can do that, and the simulations of that are pretty spectacular, but predict that the actual event is downright cataclysmic for anything too close). Think of it like this: In the same way that a solar system is a large central star with many planets and other celestial objects orbiting it, a galaxy is a supermassive black hole with ''stars'' and their solar systems orbiting around it, albeit on an even grander scale, relatively speaking.

Another useful note is that black holes are one of predictions derived from Einstein's theory of general [[Useful Notes/Relativity|Relativity]] -- and even in its context certain theorists saw the predictions of black holes in relativity and [http://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/0412058 expressed doubts] at least about the classical model. One such theorist was, initially, Einstein himself, who rejected the premise of a black hole rather strongly. Black holes just didn't make sense, especially how they muck up the nice wonderful understanding of space and time (we think) we have.

 

 

Right now there's no strict proof that such things exist: granted, there ''are'' heavy low-radiating objects ("black hole candidates"), but whether some low-emission star inside an enormous gas and dust cloud is really a black hole or not... Yet, there is one [http://arxiv.org/abs/0903.1105 article], that states: Sagittarius A* (a source of radio waves, associated with a supermassive object in the center of the Milky Way) must have an event horizon because, given the amount of superhot infalling matter we've detected around it, its surface luminosity is too low to be explained ''without'' something that traps radiation.

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[[Category:Black Holes]]