The December issue of Scientific American has an overview article about Black Holes (BH). As I’m now covering Chapter 4 on the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence from my book on SIMPLE SOLUTIONS for Humanity, I thought we would divert today just so we can get to better appreciate time and space, synchronized with matter and energy:
1. It takes light 100,000 years just to travel across our Milky Way Galaxy. Homo sapiens just about developed that far back in history.
2. If we were to flash a hypothetical ultra powerful laser in the direction of the Andromeda Galaxy (our closest neighbor), it would take two and a half million years to get there.
3. The fastest man-made object, Helios 2, at 154,00 mlles per hour, traveled at about 0.00023 the speed of light.
4. There are more than 100 billion galaxies out there, and maybe as many as 500 billion.
Our universe is, indeed, vast.
But astrophysicists keep remarking that what you see is not all that there is. There are atoms and stuff that make up stars, you, whatever...viewable, but those account for less than 5% of what must exist to satisfy current theory. 23% is something called dark matter, which the recently reactivated Large Hadron Collider might succeed in detecting. Then there is the remaining 72% (some say 74%) called dark energy, whatever that is. Words like quintessence and cosmological constant are tossed around. Anyway, the real we (us, cars, stars) are apparently shrinking, in the media, for in 1998, only 90% of the universe was invisible.
The current astroscience is that there is a black hole in the middle of our and all galaxies. The question is, did the hole come first, or did the swirling stars create it. The answer is probably the former.
Now that you are totally confused, we can slip into the world of Black Holes (BH). First, what is it? BHs are, simply, the last stage of a massive star, which has to be at least ten times larger than our Sun. Thus, our Sun will never become a BH. Now this huge star needs to actually undergo a supernova explosion, which leads to an entity with no volume and infinite density, whose surface is called the event horizon, surrounded by an accretion disk. A reasonable analogy would be our solar system, with the planetary/asteroid system being this disk, the Sun the event horizon and the black hole hidden inside. Energy and matter get drawn in and cannot leave, except for certain emissions. What you will someday see is not the black hole but the sucking-in activity. There are essentially two kinds of BH, the type above and the super massive BH (SMBH), which could have trapped the equivalent of billions of stars.
The average black hole has a diameter of tens of kilometers, but there are supermassive black holes about three times the size of our solar system. The Hubble Telescope thought it saw a BH in 2002, but the confirmed first might have been in 2004 3 light years away from Saggitarius A.
The mystery of BHs is that some feel there can be no such object and probably no one has yet seen a black hole. A BH should almost surely be a sphere, although some have mused about a spinning top.
Scientists are still developing detection systems to view our SMBH (guessed to be 3 million suns) at the center of our Milky Way, known by astronomers as Sagittarius A* (SGR A*), plus a second site, the elliptical galaxy M87 (3 billion suns). Our BH is only about 25,000 light years away, while that of M87 is 55 million LY away. However, M87 is expected to have a silhouette twice as large as SGR A*. The telescope of choice is the very long baseline interferometer (VLBI), where an array of such devices scattered around the world will be synchronized. They should succeed before 2020, if not by 2012.
Care to speculate on how a BH will look? This is a black hole from Mr. Barlow’s Blog:
Peter Barlow lived two centuries ago and created a special lens.
Here is another one from EIU Astro:
Then, there are fuzz balls and wormholes, but I’ll leave them to a later posting.
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After jumping nearly 150 points in the first hour, the Dow Jones Industrials crashed, but settled up 23 to 10,389, with world markets also mostly up. Japan's Nikkei is now at 10,023.
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Gold sunk $41/toz to $1162. Whoa, what's happening? Simple, for the jobs numbers look better, signaling a strengthening of the American dollar. Silver and platinum both also fell. Oil is at $75/barrel.
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There are no major storms over our oceans.
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