Black Hole is Dark & Scary By Katherine Lightwood

Black Hole is Dark & Scary

By Katherine Lightwood

I was feeling quite scared yesterday night. A feeling of hollowness and void seemed to engulf me. It felt like I was having an out of body experience. Sitting in front of my computer chair I was feeling dizzy. I tried to take a short nap but the caffeine seemed to work at its wonders and I was awake. But even though all these my mind was in a super 'procrastinating' mood. So I went outside at my balcony and glanced at the night sky. The sky was overcast with clouds and it was slightly thundering. An eerie sensation gripped me as I was watching the grim weather. I started wondering what the outer space would look like now? A starlight sky or dark? And then the 'nerd' inside me growled and I got my topic for today's blog post. It's 'Black Hole' baby!!     

Now, mathematically speaking anything could become a black hole, if you compress it into a small enough space. Everything in this universe has what is known as a 'Schwarzschild's Radius'. A tiny amount of space where you collapse the entire mass of the object and its density would be so great that it's gravitational pull will not even allow light to escape from it. And there you go. You have a 'Black Hole'. If you were to compress a Mount Everest into something smaller than a nanometer, you would have a Black Hole. A star many times larger than our sun has much large Schwarzschild's Radius. And when it runs out of fuel it collapses to a single infinitesimally small point called 'Singularity'. Its density would be infinite and its gravitational pull would be so strong that nothing can escape, not even light.

Now, here's a very fun idea. Well, as I told you about Black Hole and you might have understood what I've said now have you ever thought that what would it be like if you were told to jump into one? Oh Yeah!! That would be super dark.

First, let's imagine what it would look like from the outside (I mean from someone else's perspective). And not exactly imagine it's fully based on science. Well, we know gravitational field bends space and time. Stars behind our sun will actually appear to be in a slightly different location from the earth because the sun's gravitational field bends the light coming from those stars. When it comes to the gravitational field of a larger object like entire galaxies or for that matter a black hole the effect is more prominent. The light coming from those objects behind them is significantly distorted producing smears and smudges.

A gravitational not only warps space, it also warps time. And near a black hole gravity would be so strong that an observer standing, watching you jump into the black hole would see something quite strange. And oh no, they will not see you sucked up quickly into the black hole. Instead, they would see your approach becomes slower and slower until you reach a point known as '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 watch you fall into the hole, that would be where your journey ended. You would seem almost frozen in space. The light coming from your body becoming increasingly reshifted until you simply faded into nothingness. They would never see you cross the event horizon. Well, it's for the observer. And in your perspective, you will be spaghettified until you become a thin stream of protons and neutrons. And that is something very scary. So, it's a scare of the day.

So, that was my thought of the day. To see more posts like this make sure to visit our main page. And Do not forget to visit our institute's page to know more about graphic design, 3D, animation courses and other awesome stuff. Till then good day to you.

Katherine Lightwood