![]() ![]() Yet for a supermassive black hole, such as the one thought to reside at the centre of our galaxy, an object could readily sink below the event horizon before becoming spaghetti, at a distance of many tens of thousands of kilometres from its centre. For an "ordinary" black hole that has been produced by the collapse of a high mass star, this could be several hundred kilometres away from the event horizon – the point beyond which no information can escape a black hole. The exact point at which these forces become too much to bear will depend critically on the mass of a black hole. Hence, your body or any other object, such as Earth, will start to resemble spaghetti long before it hits the centre of the black hole. The net result is not only an elongation of the body overall, but also a thinning out (or compression) in the middle. This will cause parts of the body toward the edges to be brought inwards. Worse than that, your arms, by virtue of the fact that they're not at the centre of your body, will be attracted in a slightly different (vector) direction than your head is. Since your feet are physically closer to the black hole, they will feel a stronger gravitation pull towards it than your head will. Imagine that you are headed feet first towards a black hole. ![]() This effect is caused due to a gravitation gradient across your body. In brief, if you stray too close to a black hole, then you will stretch out, just like spaghetti. One of the best known effects of a nearby black hole has the imaginative title of "Spaghettification". And it is the mass of the black hole – and the huge gravitational forces that its mass generates – which does the "damage" to nearby objects. The very definition of a black hole is that it has its mass concentrated in to a vanishingly small volume – the "singularity". Of these parameters, mass is arguably the most significant. Put simply: no matter how hairy or complex an object you throw in to a black hole, it will get reduced down (or shaved) to its mass, charge and spin. Indeed, these are the only three parameters that an outside observer can ever know about since all other information about anything that goes in to making up a black hole is lost. There are three properties of a black hole that are (in principle) measurable: their mass, their spin (or angular momentum) and their overall electronic charge. Invariably though, the one item that is almost assured to come up are the largely gruesome ways in which black holes might theoretically affect human beings and the Earth itself. ![]() Many of the questions I am asked regard how "true" science fiction concerning black holes might be, and whether worm holes, such as those featured in Stargate, are real or not. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |