Thursday 14 February 2013

10 MIND BENDING FACTS ABOUT BLACK HOLES - VIDEO

Artist’s rendition of a black hole drawing gas off
a nearby star. Credit: NASA E/PO, Sonoma
State University, Aurore Simonnet
Ah Black Holes, the most mysterious object in the Universe. Why is it so mysterious, you ask? Well, because it's black. We can't see inside it, we send light to it, it don't come back. No signals bounces off it, we can't see it, don't know how it looks like. All we know is if you check in, you don't check out.

What are Black Holes?

Really, what are Black Holes? How do they form? This is a very interesting question. Of course I ain't no scientist, so I ain't gonna be talking for 3 hours about Black Holes. But I will try to explain in simple terms what they are and how they form, with some help from our good friend EarthSky.

And later you can watch the interesting video about 10 mind bending facts about Black Holes too. So, what are these things, these Black Holes? They are nothing more than extremely dense cores of once-massive stars. Most stars, like our sun, end their lives peacefully by gently blowing their outer layers into space. But stars exceeding about eight times the mass of the sun have other ideas of ending their lives. They don't die peacefully in their sleep. They go out with a bang, literally.

According to EarthSky:
These stars die when they can no longer fuse atomic nuclei in their core. It’s not that they run out of fuel, per se. Rather, once the star has a core of iron, fusing together atoms to make new elements actually costs the star energy. Lacking an energy source, the star can’t hold itself up against the relentless struggle with gravity. The outer layers of the star come crashing down.
As several octillion tons of gas come hurtling down, the star’s core undergoes a drastic change and becomes resilient to further compression. The infalling gas hits the now-hardened core and rebounds. The rapid gas compression sets off one last wave of uncontrolled nuclear fusion. The star, now wildly out of balance, explodes. The resulting supernova can outshine an entire galaxy and can be seen from across the universe.
In the supernova’s wake, the core remains. This dense soup of subatomic particles has a couple of options at this point. For a star with less mass than 20 suns, the core holds together as a neutron star. But for the real stellar heavyweights, the core transforms into a truly exotic object. A black hole is born.
So basically, a Black Hole is a small object with a f@#$ing huge gravity. It's like the Earth is the size of an apple but the gravity stays the same as it is now. Not sure if this analogy is correct but you get the idea. So squeezing a lot of mass into a smaller and smaller volume makes the gravity at a dead star’s surface skyrocket which makes it increasingly difficult for anything to escape.

Here is how to understand how this huge gravity is preventing even light from escaping a Black Hole.
Throw a ball up into the air, and eventually it stops, turns around, and comes back to your hand. Throw the ball harder, it goes higher – but still falls back down. Throw the ball hard enough and the ball can escape Earth’s gravity. That point-of-no-return is called the “escape velocity”. It’s different for every planet, star, and comet. Earth’s escape velocity is about 40,000 km/hr. For the sun, it’s over 2 million km/hr!. On a very small asteroid, jumping too high might accidentally launch you into orbit.
On a black hole, however, the escape velocity is greater than the speed of light!
What is the speed of light? It's the ultimate speed in the Universe. Nothing can go faster than light. So if even light itself cannot escape, what hope is there for us. In our souped up 600 hp V8 Mustang.

Ok, so that is quite the bendy bit right there. But below is the video I promised you. There's 10 mind bending facts there, so go ahead and enjoy it. I hope you like it and continue to ponder the awesome secrets of the Universe.


Again, as usual if you feel that this post is funny, entertaining or informative, please do share with your network. Hopefully more people will be well informed and entertained.

What? Is this a cheap blog post to sell my book? Hell yeah! I wrote the damn book, am I supposed to keep it or give it away for free? Yeah giving it away for free sounds like the right thing to do but I gotta eat. I'll probably write another book one day and give that away for free but for now, you can download the free sample chapters.


To get a free 40 page sample of all the chapters, click on the image below.

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