Black Holes Monsters in the Sky

“This”Black Holes Monsters in the Sky” is a submission for Kevin’s No Theme Thursday

Image by Kevin from The Beginning at Last

Black holes, everyone has heard of them, no one understands them. They are inscrutable monsters in the sky. They are regions of spacetime wherein gravity is so strong that nothing can escape, not light, not anything. Some of them are small, only 15 kilometers across, and some have a diameter 27 billion times larger than that.

As you get close to a black hole your time will run slower. You won’t notice it, but others will see you move in slow motion. If you return from your close encounter an hour on your clock might correspond to years elsewhere. As you approach the event horizon, the boundary of no escape, you become invisible and time will stop, at least from an outside view.

Black holes are invisible. They are truly black. However, we can see them if they are consuming matter. The matter close to black holes will heat up and glow. The closer to the event horizon the redder it is. It is called an accretion disk as in the depiction above.

There are an estimated 100 million black holes in our galaxy, the Milky Way. At the center of the Milky Way is a super massive black hole called Sagittarius A-star. It is 4 million times more massive than our sun. There are supermassive black holes located at the center of most large galaxies. The supermassive black holes are considered to play a crucial role in the formation of galaxies.

I’ve looked up in the sky, and I’ve seen the spot where Sagittarius A-star is located. I’ve tried to look at it with my telescope, but I cannot see it. It is not possible to see it with a telescope, but it is there. The picture above may depict the view from a planet in the center of our galaxy. Three scientists received the Nobel prize in physics in 2020 for their research on black holes (Roger Penrose, Reinhard Genzel, and Andrea Ghez).

However, before them the tele evangelist Jack Van Impe won the 2001 Ig Nobel Prize in Astrophysics for his discovery that black holes meet all the technical requirements for Hell. The Ig Nobel prize is an alternative and less serious Nobel Prize. To find out more about Black Holes click here.

Below is an animation created by NASA that depicts what an observer falling into a black hole would see.

To see the Super Facts click here

Author: thomasstigwikman

My name is Thomas Wikman. I am a software/robotics engineer with a background in physics. I am currently retired. I took early retirement. I am a dog lover, and especially a Leonberger lover, a home brewer, craft beer enthusiast, I’m learning French, and I am an avid reader. I live in Dallas, Texas, but I am originally from Sweden. I am married to Claudia, and we have three children. I have two blogs. The first feature the crazy adventures of our Leonberger Le Bronco von der Löwenhöhle as well as information on Leonbergers. The second blog, superfactful, feature information and facts I think are very interesting. With this blog I would like to create a list of facts that are accepted as true among the experts of the field and yet disputed amongst the public or highly surprising. These facts are special and in lieu of a better word I call them super-facts.

25 thoughts on “Black Holes Monsters in the Sky”

  1. This is a truly great and fascinating read, Thomas. I know very little about black holes other than what one sees or hears in sci-fi themed shows. Thank you for sharing this knowledge and welcome to No Theme Thursday!

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  3. I liked the TV show Black Sun where the premise is that the scientific community discovers that something is happening, and there’s a massive conspiracy to cover it up. In the very last episode of the first season it’s revealed that (spoiler alert!) the titular black sun is a black hole passing close enough to the sun to siphon material off from it; in the last show of the season, all the action (there’s a massive fight underway) comes to a halt and everyone looks up at the sky to see the black hole in action. Sadly, they never made a second season, so I guess we just have to assume that everything ended badly …

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    2. Well, the first time you came over it may not have worked at all. When I complained to the happiness engineers they were reluctant to take it seriously and then the happiness engineer tried to subscribe but he couldn’t so then they knew it was a real problem. It was fixed last week. So the subscribe button should work now like you said. Again thank you so much Laura.

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    1. A video like this one? It is quite complicated. To create this video they had to calculate, using General Relativity, how time and space was distorted as well as figuring out how the bending of the light would affect what you see. It was done using a supercomputer. But I can imagine myself coming out of retirement, getting a PhD in Astrophysics (I have an MS in physics), and then renting a supercomputer for my PhD thesis and for a video like this. I would love to do that, but it would be quite ambitious. I am not sure I am up for it. You are making me think out loud. But maybe I should at least learn how to make videos for simpler things. You are giving me ideas. In any case I liked the video too. They are certainly strange objects.

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    1. Maybe, I did not read the book or saw the movie. I know that Kip Thorne a theoretical physicist provided the math for the visual effects in the movie Interstellar and helped them get the science right. When they visited Miller’s planet, the one that is close to a black hole there is a loud clock ticking in the background. It seems like every tick is a second. The movie does not say what it is, but each tick is not a second but 0.7 seconds, which corresponded to one day on Earth. You are right. You can make many horror stories out of black holes. The Ig Nobel Prize in Astrophysics awarded to tele evangelist Jack Van Impe was not to insult him but because his idea was interesting even though it was not real research.

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    2. Yes another example is Justin Schmidt an entomologist who won an Ig Nobel Prize in 2015 for creating the “Schmidt Sting Pain Index”. He allowed himself to be stung by 100’s of insects, ants, bees, wasps, etc., and he ranked them. Some of the insects he got stung by are really horrible and dangerous. However, his research is valuable and is cited in thousands of places, but it was still sort of crazy and it has entertainment value. He sacrificed himself for science.

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