Wednesday, March 4, 2009

Black holes....a lot like a mental illness episode

In the universe, there are these things called black holes. They are at huge centers of the galaxies and have incredible gravitational force--it's part of their nature. There is something around the perimeter of the black hole called the event horizon--but I call it the point of no return. When something ventures too close to the "point of no return" around the black hole, it gets sucked into the gravitational center of the black hole and then something remarkable happens. All the "space" between the atoms that is there normally, disappears and the unlucky heavenly body get squished to 1/1,000,000,000 of it's original size at the center of the black hole.

To illustrate this, if something the size of the Earth crossed the "point of no return" in a black hole, it would be "squished" to approximately the size of a NBA sized basketball. However, no mass would be lost, and the gravity exerted by the "Earthy basketball" would be the same, but we would certainly be finished!

Thankfully, the chances of this actually happening are infintesimily small, so we do not need to worry about crossing the "point of no return" anytime soon!

No comments: