Black Holes

by Alex B.

     The idea that black holes are wormholes that can take you to the other side of the universe is a Hollywood idea, but some scientists put some faith in it. Imagine a sheet of paper. Put one point on one side of the paper, and at the far end of the paper. To get from one point to another one would walk across the sheet. It's hypothesized that a black hole could "bend the paper" and end up making the two points right next to each other. Getting through a black hole in such a fashion would be highly unlikely however, seeing as approximately one tenth of a second before you reached the singularity, you would be torn apart by tidal forces. But, let’s take a step back and figure out what some of these things actually mean.

     A black hole is perhaps one of the simplest things in the universe. It is basically a place with so much gravity that even light cannot escape it. This, however, can make them difficult to find, the primary way we know that they are there is from the accretion disk. This is depicted in the picture to the below left, and it is when something that is getting sucked into the black hole circles around it because of the gravity of the black hole combined with the movement of the object. This is not the only way we can know they are there, we can also tell that a black hole is there from the distortion that it makes when there is light behind it. Because the black hole bends the light in interesting ways, we can see when the light is bent a certain way which indicates a black hole. A picture of what the earth would look like from behind a black hole is pictured below.

     So now let's talk about how a black hole works. A black hole is normally formed by a star that has collapsed in upon itself, but theoretically, anything can become a black hole. The earth could become a black hole if its volume reached its Schwarzchild radius (simply the size it must have to become a black hole). Even you or me could become one. Just to give you an idea of how dense a black hole is, the earth would have to be reduced down to the size of a peanut for it to become a black hole, just 9mm. The Schwarzchild radius of our sun is approximately 9km. There is little threat however, because there is no technology that we know of that can make anything even close to that dense.