[ Featuring Nino Morro ]
For centuries, space and the galaxies within it have been a mystery to scientists, astronomers and scholars alike. But we have only relatively recently begun to understand the phenomenon known as the black hole, a phenomenon that generates forces so powerful, it completely distorts space and time. Strange, violent things happen when space comes into conjunction with a black hole. But how does something like this come into existence?
A black hole begins its life as a star, many times the size of our own sun. When the star s gasses that allow it to burn are exhausted, effectively running out of fuel, it begins to collapse in on itself. Everything around it is sucked in. Nothing can escape.
When a star collapses, there is a build-up of pressure, or force, much like if you shook up a bottle of fizzy drink, and the energy tries to escape in the form of an explosion. Electrons don t really like to be close to one another because like charges repel, and as they are squashed together they move faster and faster in an attempt to move out of each other s way. We call this the Pauli exclusion theory, where basically no more than two identical electrons can occupy the same quantum state.
[Background trickling water]
This tiny stream here gives a rather good analogy of how a black hole works. This water here is flowing gently through the tributary, much like a star in space; gravity fuses everything together, all moving as one.
As we make our way further down, the water connects to the river in which the water starts to move faster. It then flows on to its next destination over there, over the edge of that enormous waterfall. If I was to jump in, the sheer velocity of the water would carry me over the edge, no matter how hard I swam. In the same way space is hurtling at the speed of light towards the edges of the black hole, which we call the event horizon . Why is that? The same cause and reason as the waterfall: gravity.
Even light, which travels at 300km a second, cannot escape the enormous forces of a black hole. As it is drawn in, we can see in photographs that light creates a halo effect as it cascades over the edge and into this violent, unrelenting whirlpool of gravitational forces.
If you were to pass over the event horizon in the same way you may go feet first down a slide, at first your feet would accelerate faster than your head, but in the context of a black hole you would be stretched and spaghettified.
The closest and so far only theory we have about the effects of a black hole is Einstein s theory of general relativity, which tells us space and time must become curved and dense eventually becoming a dimensionless, mathematical point, which we call, the singularity . Anything after this is currently far beyond our understanding.
[ENDS]
