Kevin Huynh

Professor Gretchen Pratt

UWRT 1102–014

April 1, 2015

Want to go into a black hole?

How would you like to die? Would you like to die by being sucked into a black hole?

Personally, I think that would be kind of cool. You would be able to say "I went out in a star."

Only problem is that it is you would be able to tell the tale anyone and that it is painful. Just

imagine being pulled apart until there is nothing left of you.

What is a black hole? “A black hole is a place in space where gravity pulls so much that

even light can not get out. The gravity is so strong because matter has been squeezed into a tiny

space. This can happen when a star is dying” (Smith).

Death of a Star!

No not about a star that is a famous person but as in “a luminous ball of gas, mostly

hydrogen and helium, held together by its own gravity” (Temming). Out of the possibilities of

the death of a star, I thought that the formation of a black hole would be interesting. A black hole

is formed when the nuclear fuels are exhausted in the star’s core. “The outward pressure of the

radiation givers out and the pressure of gravity wins and the star implodes” (Cain).The thought

of how there is nothing in the center of it is a mystery.

History of a Black Hole

The idea of a black hole was first formed by the geologist John Mitchell. The theory that

he thought of was that if you could compress something large like our sun to a very small point,

the gravity would be so great nothing could escape it. Later Simon Pierre LaPlace predicted their

existence is possible somewhere in the universe. Albert Einstein Published the Theory of General

Relativity in 1915 which predicts space-time curvature. This supported black holes because the

space around black holes bend time and space. Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar used the theory of

white dwarfs to understand the limits of if a star will become a white dwarf, neutron star, or a

black hole. The term ‘black hole’ was then coined by John Wheeler in 1964. Stephen Hawking

later defined the modern theory of black holes in 1970. In 1994, the Hubble Space Telescope

provided evidence of black hole in the center of some galaxies.

At a black hole, this is the place where the laws of physics break down. A black hole

bends time and space around it. A misconception of a black hole is that the center of a black

hole was a worm hole that can instantly transport you to a place in the universe. A worm hole,

which is only in theory, is also called a white hole being the opposite of a black hole, instead of

sucking things in, it expels things out. Another myth is that a black hole will consume everything

in the universe and destroy it eventually. The gravitational pull of a black hole will be the same.

Hypothetically speaking, if our Sun were to be replaced by a black hole with the same mass this

instant, we would still be rotation around the black hole as if it were the Sun (Black Hole Myths).

The culture of black holes today is very big. There are television shows and even movies

that reference it in some point. Some movies and television shows are: Doctor Who, Interstellar,

and Star Trek. Seeing how popular black holes are in our culture, I decided to look them up to

learn more about them.

VSauce?

I came across a YouTube account a long time ago named VSauce. Around the time of

early high school was when I found it. This YouTube account at first was a channel that talked

about things you can do on the internet. As of today, it has changed to an educational channel. I

had followed this YouTube account since then. I have learned a lot of information watching

these videos. The content always interested me because he would ask a strange question, then

use science and studies that relate to it to answer the question. I was tricked and was pulled into

the strange question and watched the video. One example of a video was “What color is a

Mirror?” The interesting question pulled me in. Then some videos he had put out about space

and this is what got me interested in space. “Travel INSIDE a black hole” and “What’s the

Brightest Thing in the Universe?” This is what led me to choose my topic about a star. So when I

had to choose my topic of death, I didn’t want to do it about a person but something else.

Don’t head towards the black hole.

Everyone has heard of the term “Don’t head towards the light” right? When a person

comes back to life after on the brink of death right? What if I told you there was an even brighter

place that you would not want to go? A black hole will eat up the gas and debris from the stars

and swirl into accretion disks. “In the disk, the debris spins at unfathomable speeds being pulled

by a black hole billions of times more massive than our Sun” (Stevens). I found that the accretion

disk creates so much friction that it generates heat. It is so hot that it is called a quasar. “Quasars

are so bright that they shine thousands of times more brightly than galaxies containing billions of

stars” (Stevens). When I heard this, I couldn’t imagine how bright this thing could be. “The first

quasar identified, 3C 273, had an absolute magnitude of -26.7, making it four trillion time

brighter than our Sun” (Stevens). Quasars being billions of light years away, they are one of the

oldest things in our universe. Since they are really old, they will probably most likely already be

gone because “what we see are just their ghosts. Light that left when they were active that

traveled longer than they could live” (Stevens). “The brightest places have the darkest, emptiest

skies… The brightest things in the universe, quasars, are caused by the darkest things in the

universe – black holes. The process that unshackles the most light is caused by the thing that best

imprisons it” (Stevens). When I heard this, I was mind blown. I just couldn’t believe that that

was the brightest thing in the universe.

I take something, make it nothing.

What does a black hole do? A black hole is an object in space with a density that is

infinite with a gravitational pull so great that not even light could escape it. Since nothing is

faster than the speed of light, nothing can escape from the black hole. If you were to head

towards a black hole, “that an observer standing and watching you jump into a black hole, would

see something quite strange. They wouldn’t see you get sucked quickly into the hole- instead,

they would see your approach become slower, and slower until you reach a point known as the

event-horizon. This is a point in space where, once crossed, there’s no going back. It is at that

point that light can no longer escape. And, so, to a person watching you fall into the hole that

would be where your journey ended. You would seem almost frozen in space, the light coming

off your body becoming increasingly red-shifted until you simply faded into nothingness”

(Stevens) I heard this and thought that it would be kind of weird to watch but wonder what the

person going into the black hole would experience. Would they also seem to feel slower? So then

he explains what the person going into the black hole would experience. “As you continue to

approach the black hole’s singularity, your view of the entire universe would get compressed

into a smaller and smaller point in space behind you… It might take us hours to actually reach a

point where things started to hurt. Why would they hurt? Well, the closer you get to the

singularity, the more significant the difference in gravitational pull across space. And, so, parts

of me that are closer to the singularity would be pulled more strongly than parts that were facing

away and my entire body would be stretched toward the singularity. The effect would be so

incredible, scientists don’t call it stretching, and they call it ‘Spaghettification.’ Once you reach

this point, you would be dead. Your molecules would be violently ripped and stretched apart, and

when they got to the singularity, well, we don’t really know what would happen” (Stevens). This

process sounded very painful. But I thought would be pretty cool how you would die by a black

hole. There would be nothing of you left in the universe. A black hole would take you and make

you completely disappear.

Would you want to dive into a black hole?

I personally might want to die in a black hole. Sure I don’t like pain, but I think it would

be cool. Dying to the point where there is nothing left for anyone to look back on. There might

be nothing left, but it would be a death where everyone would remember me by. I doubt there

will be something that would take me twenty-five thousand light years to our resident black hole

at the center of our galaxy, Sagittarius A*, so that I could dive into the black hole. One day,

someone might invent a way to travel that long in a span of one person’s life time. Until then, I’ll

stay here on Earth.

"Black Hole Myths." Black Hole Myths. N.p., n.d. Web. 31 Mar. 2015.

Cain, Fraser. "How Do Black Holes Form?" Universe Today. Fraser Cain, 27 Sept. 2013. Web.

24 Apr. 2015.

"HubbleSite - Reference Desk - FAQs." HubbleSite - Reference Desk. N.p., n.d. Web. 23 Feb.

2015.

Stevens, Michael. "Travel INSIDE a Black Hole." YouTube. YouTube, 6 Mar. 2012. Web. 01

Mar. 2015.

Stevens, Michael. "What's The Brightest Thing In the Universe?" YouTube. YouTube, 03 Feb.

2014. Web. 01 Mar. 2015.

Temming, Maria. "What Is a Star? - Sky & Telescope." Sky Telescope ICal. N.p., 15 July 2014.

Web. 31 Mar. 2015.

"The Black Hole at the Center of Our Galaxy: Don't Panic!" YouTube. YouTube, 23 Dec. 2014.

Web. 25 Mar. 2015

"What Happens Inside A Black Hole?" YouTube. YouTube, 26 Sept. 2014. Web. 03 Mar. 2015.