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Post by Toxic-Avenger on Feb 12, 2002 8:57:18 GMT -5
Is anyone obsessed with these things like I am? Or just intensely interested? It's amazing how we've adopted the term, "black hole," to describe anything that uses up time, money, or energy or all of it. But that's the amazing thing, black holes actually make more energy than they take in, yet all they are, are holes in space, and even time. "A black hole is an area of space where nothing can come back and time stops." Yet all this comes from a large star that collapsed in on itself. Other black holes, like the supermassive ones at the center of most galaxies, get their mass from drawing in matter and energy. Yet, they are undetectable by themselves. The Hubble Space Telescope found the 2 or 3 million solar mass black hole at the center of our galaxy because of stars flying around the Milky Way's hub at a few hundred miles per second. Then there's what a black hole does. It doesn't "suck" like a vacuum cleaner. Black holes are known to push things away, like a planet. Imagine a two-solar mass black hole, bumping into our solar system and pushing the Earth out of its orbit. Then there's my favorite subject about black holes. Their size. Some black holes are small. A two-solar mass black hole, that is weighing as much as two of our suns, is about six miles wide. Then we have intermediate sized black holes weighing 10 solar masses and up to 1,000. Then we get into the ones called Super Massive black holes at the center of galaxies. Millions and even billions of solar mass black holes. A 30,000,000 solar mass black hole, at the center of the Andromeda Galaxy is the size of Earth's orbit around the sun. Its accretion disk is ten times that size! Then there's black holes the size of our solar system, like the one in the galaxy M-87 with an accretion disk a few light-days distance across. What's interesting is, the larger black holes are less violent than the smaller 10 solar mass type. Here's some links: www.msnbc.com/news/135107.asp This link will take you to a site where you can hear what a black hole might sound like. www.google.com is a great search engine. Type in, black holes, in the subject line and every site you've ever wanted will come up. So what say you?
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Post by sunny.side.up on Feb 12, 2002 13:05:54 GMT -5
Wow, sounds like you know a lot about this! All I knew is that black holes come from stars that collapse. I do think it's interesting... I always thought that things disappear in a black hole, but that's not true, apparently? Well, I have no more time now but I'll come back later to check out those links. ~*Esther*~
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Post by x n0ise on Feb 12, 2002 13:12:54 GMT -5
Whoa, yeah that is interesting! I never really knew what exactly Back Holes were or, for that matter, how interesting they were! I'm gonna check out those links...Thanks Toxic-Avenger! =)
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Post by sunny.side.up on Feb 12, 2002 16:38:21 GMT -5
I'm back. I read at one of those sites that even light gets 'sucked into' a black hole. That's something I don't understand... Light is a wavelength, right? And that's not physical, right? So how can it be sucked into anything? And I can't imagine how there could be *no time*... That's just so... unimaginable... hehe. And no volume either. I wonder what it would be like to actually be inside a black hole. This is all very complicated! [glow=white,2,300]~*Esther*~[/glow]
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CH107
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Post by CH107 on Feb 12, 2002 22:47:51 GMT -5
well, you'd be crushed long before making it inside, so you'd never know. yeah, black holes are pretty cool. Light is energy. Energy can be manipulated. In a black hole, that would be tremendously higher. The gravity is actually so great in a black hole that light cannot move fast enough to escape. It's pulled back in. There are some formulas relating to gravity out in the universe. I'll try to remember them so i can post them and explain them out. Oh, also, scientists believe they have found a way to travel through time. Such an event requires the use of wormholes; black holes that have connected at the outgoing tips (toxic, fill in the name for those, i forgot what they're called). The use of anti-matter is necessary to hold the portal open. I saw an article in some magazine my physics teacher has. Quite fascinating.
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Post by sunny.side.up on Feb 13, 2002 6:37:51 GMT -5
Oh wait - it was colour that was a wavelength... or not? Hm... never mind. Anyway... ok, I think I'm sort of starting to understand the thing about the light... ~*Esther*~
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Post by Toxic-Avenger on Feb 19, 2002 12:51:16 GMT -5
Hi Sunny_Snowflake, see CH107's post. You're right, things DO disappear inside a black hole. Or more accurately, it's crushed out of existence. <br>Now your question: Light is a form of energy, it has particles. Wavelength is a MEASURE of light, maybe a TYPE of light. There's invisible light such as Ultraviolet and Infrared. Put very simplistically, wavelength determines how much light we can see with the naked eye. Other wavelengths of light, infrared and x-rays, can be seen only with equipment. But these kinds of light have particles called PHOTONS that can be pulled around and down. The color of the light is how it is broken up. White light is made of red, yellow and blue light, but that is very simplistic. Infrared is probably not red. Ultraviolet light is purple, but there's alot more to it than just the color. Infrared red light can be radiant heat for example. As you know, ultraviolet light is what helps cause sunburn. Infrared photogrphy for example, is fun to do because for black and white prints and you've seen them. The sky is grey to black, leaves are white and anything else is grey or nearly white. The film reacts to heat from these objects, not the color. You have to focus a little past the visible light. Color infrared is nice too. Leaves show up red or orange, the sky, green, and other colors are turned inside out. <br> <<I wonder what it would be like to actually be inside a black hole.>> Let's take black hole the size of the moon. You're 10,000 miles out. Your whipping around this thing very fast. You notice that the whirlpool of matter surrounding the black hole is wobbling noticably, and it looks like its switching directions. This is called FRAME DRAGGING. Time is being slowed here. Your perception of time is starting to get altered. You think you've only been here a few minutes. You've actully been here for several hours, maybe days. Within a few hours, you are now close to the speed of light. Your surroundings are millions of degrees and you just smashed into the Event Horizon, the point of no return. The horizon line of the black hole's accretion disk starts to curve up like a bow. The light is being pulled. You can see objects below the disk because the intense gravity is acting like a lens. As you get closer to the black hole, the point of intense gravity your view of visible objects becomes vastly distorted until you're gone, pulled into and crushed into the black hole's Singularity. <br> But that was a hypothetical view. The reality is, you'd be dead long before you got several thousand miles, or even feet before you hit the Event Horizon. You'd be stretched about three miles like a peice of speghetti. Event Horizon ==> (.) <== The period represents the Singularity. <br> (((( (.) )))) The other parenthesis represent the Accretion Disk. And here's some links to more sites: www.sciam.com/explorations/2001/100101chandra/ And here's one that has several animations what a black hole does and what it looks like. antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/htmltest/rjn_bht.html And this is a NASA website that answers some questions. imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/ask_astro/black_holes.html And this is what I got when I went to www.Google.com and and typed in Black Hole Sizes. www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=black+hole+sizes Click on any of the links that come up.
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CH107
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Post by CH107 on Feb 19, 2002 20:31:29 GMT -5
yeah, what he said
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Post by Aussie.Chick on Feb 25, 2002 4:01:10 GMT -5
all that sounds pretty interesting... hehe do you think it's possible to travel to different times through a black hole? i read somewhere about that... but it was a fiction book... lol so i don't think it was entirely true.
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Post by Toxic-Avenger on Feb 25, 2002 9:20:00 GMT -5
Hi Assie.Biatch. No, it's not possible to travel through time, a black hole does have the ability to act on time itself. This is called Frame Dragging. If you were able to hover near the Singularity, you would percive time as going by very slowly. You think you've been there for five minutes, yet several hours may have passed.
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Post by Toxic-Avenger on Mar 26, 2002 14:48:38 GMT -5
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Post by SunShine on Mar 26, 2002 19:35:22 GMT -5
Is a black hole really a hole? Can you go in and out of it? Does it end? I'm confused...
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CH107
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Post by CH107 on Mar 26, 2002 22:31:04 GMT -5
no, not a hole at all. in fact, black holes are quite the mysterious phenomena. A black hole, while cygnus could explain it better than I, is an insanely dense, insanely heavy location with insane gravity. Well, that's not a very good description. A black hole usually forms when a star dies. The star collapses onto itself. Skipping a lot of steps, once it's become a black hole, since it's got the mass of a sun in an area the size of a pin, it's gravity (which is insanely large) sucks everything towards it. It's so powerful, it crushes everything and everything it sucks in appears to disappear. Even light can't excape a black hole's gravity. Cygnus can explain better than I, so i'll let him explain it in more detail. yeah cygnus, who ever could that picture at that link of yours remind us of?
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Post by Toxic-Avenger on Mar 27, 2002 9:56:55 GMT -5
I have no idea! Anyway, yes, a black hole is not really a hole but a gravity well. Like CH107 said, when a star of three solar masses or more collapses in on itself, the gravity crunches everything in. What makes a black hole so weird, is that it's not that the same gravity is STRONGER than that of a star, it's that the gravity is now coming from an area the size of a small town, insead of an object that's a million miles in diameter. <br> In other words lets say one million-solar mass star, a star the weight of one million of our suns. It's size would be nearly triple that of our sun. Now, after all the gasses and nuclear fusion processes are used up, the extreme weight of the star cannot support its own weight and collapses into a small point. Part of the compression comes from the 40,000 miles-per-second speed which all this stuff collapses and compresses. Now you have a point, the size of a pinhead, the Singularity, where everything is crushed out of existence because the gravity of a million-solar mass star, is now in an area the size of a ==>. It's the Event Horizon that can be up to three miles wide or more, but that's the point of No Return. <br> To answer SunShine's question. Depends: If you are stuck in the accretion disk, you can escape. But once you get to within a certain distance of a black hole, you're doomed. In this case, you can cruise around the accretion disk of a supermassive black hole, say about 30,000,000 solar masses, for weeks. To give you an idea, this black hole is about the size of Earth's orbit around the sun, with an accretion disk about ten times the width, so it's about the width of our solar system. The black hole mentioned is at the center of M-31, the Andromeda Galaxy. <br> But once you get to the Event Horizon, you're toast, so to speak. You cannot escape its gravity. But as matter and gasses in the accretion disk get closer to the Singularity, the molecules run together, and as we know from our science books, this matter heats up to millions of degrees. This is why, you can't see a black hole directly, but you can see what it's doing. This also includes the X-Rays blowing out of its poles. <br> Yes, a black hole ends since it's just a finite point. Here are some more links to check out. There's some animations to look at. archive.ncsa.uiuc.edu/Cyberia/NumRel/BlackHoleAnat.htmlcasa.colorado.edu/~ajsh/schw.shtmlcasa.colorado.edu/~ajsh/relativity.htmlcasa.colorado.edu/~ajsh/approach.html
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Post by SunShine on Mar 27, 2002 22:28:11 GMT -5
Thank you CH107 and Toxic-Avenger! Black holes are so confusing! I'll check out those links.
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