Astrophysics
Black Holes
Imagine a region in space only about 10 miles in diameter, but easily weighing 10 to 4.3 million solar masses. This is the realm of black holes. Black holes begin forming when a star of 15-20 solar masses begins running low on the hydrogen fuel it feeds on and starts creating iron. All the elements of lower mass than iron are regenerative. They produce more energy, through nuclear fusion, then they weigh, and contribute to the growth of the star. However, all the elements after manganese are degenerative. After only a few million years of iron production, the outward pressure from the fusion outweighs the inward pressure of gravity. This inward pressure then pushes particles closer and closer each other until finally, the very quantum states of these particles are pressured to overlap, which would break Pauli Exclusion and the gluons that bind the atoms together inversely release their energy, spewing them apart. The star explodes in a supernova, leaving vast amounts of matter and energy built up over billion of years in its wake. All that remain of the star is a superdense core, compacted from billions of years of pressure. Now, with nothing left pushing out, the dead star implodes on itself creating an extremely dense ball of matter with a spacetime curvature far greater than 45 degrees, celeritas. Not even light can escape from this ball of infinite mass. But with infinite space curvature, there must also be infinite time curvature. As one nears the Schwarchild radius (sometimes called the event horizon), observed time itself slows to a stop. Imagine a man
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falling straight into a black hole. As observers we would see Bob slowly decelerate as he reaches the event horizon until it appears that he has stopped moving entirely. However, Bob would feel completely normal not and would not all notice anything at all. One second he'd be outside the event horizon and the next, he would be within the black hole. By this time, outside the black hole, infinite time would have passed. We as observers would have continued with our normal lives, with Bob still appearing to be outside the event horizon. Eventually, we'd die and Bob would still be on the edge of the event horizon. Bob could watch the entire future of the universe unfold in a nanosecond. Finally, the end of time, Bob would cross the event horizon into black hole. There are a few flaws with this thought experiment. First off, we on Earth would not be able to see Bob. Even
Being unseseptible to light, it s difficult to spot a black hole. Often the only way to detect one is when stars are observed in their normal obrit then suddenly acclerate and curve around a point (shown left and in background). This is because, most if not all black holes have spin. This spin causes frame draging in which the black hole is moving so fast that spacetime is unable to fully shift around it. This realtime lag causes matter within the ergosphere, the area around a black hole in which objects must do work to avoid being pulled into the event horizon, to speed around the black hole until it is flung out into space (shown below), similar to the outward force felt on a rotating amusement ride.
Quasars
Quasars were first discovered in the 1960s when a radio telescope was pointed at the sky. They detected some stars, our sun and other parts of the milky-way, but they also found small, bright objects and were finally named quasi-stellar objects or quasars for short. These mystical objects traveled one third the speed of light and generating as much energy as a whole galaxy. They totally stumped astronomers.Finally, in the 1980s, scientists began to think that quasars came from the active galaxy theory, an idea that have a small, ball of energy emissions that condenses mass on a whole new level, blasting radiation into space.
Now, 50 years after their discovery, we know that when matter builds up around a black holes, it gets incredibly hot and begins, you guessed it, blasting out enormous amounts of radiation. However, not all black holes are quasars. If a black hole has run out of matter to devour, it becomes an inactive nucleaus. But, when they run out of fuel, their not just extinguished, never again to be a quasar, if something else comes near, the whole process starts back up again. For example, the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy currently has an inactive nucleus, but in a few billion years, when the Milky Way collides with Andromeda, that black hole, now having matter to feed on, will probably start back up again.
Ripples in
Spacetime
In 1915, Albert Einstein showcased general relativity, thus predicting the existence of the graviton boson and gravitational waves. This is a phenomenon deeming that when 2 black holes or white dwarf stars are caught in one another's gravitational fields, they began orbiting each other, exerting an extreme amount of force. But this force isn't normal, instead of it acting as normal gravitation, a constant that only survives while its creator remains, these give off a special kind of gravitation. Like ordinary gravity, gravitational waves cannot be stopped by matter, but these waves literally move through it, unaffected by even the most massive. They create a ripple in spacetime, as appears on a lake when you drop a pebble into it. And they continue forever. Great, how can you prove it? That was the purpose of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observer (LIGO) built and funded by MIT and CalTech. It works by sending a super-focused laser down a one-mile tunnel. On both sides, a microscopic detector watches for even the smallest movement. When the gravitons go through the laser, it will move slightly. On Sep. 17, 2015, LIGO successfully detected the waves, proving the existence of the graviton, and once again teaching us to beware of second-guessing Einstein.
before crossing the vent horizon, light is struggling to get out. It takes years to travel a distance that would usually only take a few seconds. Even if an observer were just a meter away, the light waves from Bob would be stretched to such a low frequency that it would be impossible, even with all the technology in the world, to pick up. Thus, the blackness (shown on the right) is significantly larger than the actual area under the Schwarchild radius. Furthermore, it unlikely Bob would ever get that close to the event horizon in one piece. Even though to an observer, particles around a black hole move very slow, Bob interacts with them in real time. Thus, with such vast amounts of cosmic dust concentrated around a black hole moving close to celeritas as they fall, Bob would be shredded into his basic elementary particles, slowly pushed to polar top of the black hole, then spewed out with the Hawking Radiation.