“I do not know if the hole ahead of us is good or if it is clean but it is certainly BLACK.”
“A black hole!” says the crew. Mr. Hop thinks long and hard and deep. “No one knows what lives in a black hole.”
from: Commander Toad and the Big Black Hole
by Jane Yolen
illustrated by Bruce Degen
I always thought of a black hole as a giant vacuum cleaner, sucking in debris and dust, sinking down and down like Alice, falling through the rabbit hole.
Now I know that that only occurs near the black hole’s event horizon, the place where stuff like light and space junk can enter but not come back out. Where does all that stuff go?
Black holes are invisible because they don’t emit the light they collect, but they are not imaginary. They can be detected by noting their gravitational effects on nearby objects.
Albert Einstein knew this when he proposed his theory of relativity a hundred years ago. And that theory was proved recently when two stars were observed to collide forming a black hole. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/12/science/ligo-gravitational-waves-black-holes-einstein.html?_r=0
Can time escape a black hole? I’d love to capture the moment when my then future husband first smiled at me. Funny thing is, that moment is captured—-in my imagination.
So Newton, who said that time is absolute and can be measured, was out-thought by Einstein who said it was not time, but light (what we observe) that is the constant.
I imagine the universe as a spiral, like an infinitely long piece of rotini. Each year on the anniversary of that first smile, I’m on a new level of that spiral. More observable stuff has happened: new cats and grandchildren are added to my spiral and people pass out of it, too. These timely events shape my universe and I am shaped by them.
Meanwhile, I’ll try to rescue my next great idea before it is sucked into the event horizon of my imagination!
--Stay curious!
“A black hole!” says the crew. Mr. Hop thinks long and hard and deep. “No one knows what lives in a black hole.”
from: Commander Toad and the Big Black Hole
by Jane Yolen
illustrated by Bruce Degen
I always thought of a black hole as a giant vacuum cleaner, sucking in debris and dust, sinking down and down like Alice, falling through the rabbit hole.
Now I know that that only occurs near the black hole’s event horizon, the place where stuff like light and space junk can enter but not come back out. Where does all that stuff go?
Black holes are invisible because they don’t emit the light they collect, but they are not imaginary. They can be detected by noting their gravitational effects on nearby objects.
Albert Einstein knew this when he proposed his theory of relativity a hundred years ago. And that theory was proved recently when two stars were observed to collide forming a black hole. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/12/science/ligo-gravitational-waves-black-holes-einstein.html?_r=0
Can time escape a black hole? I’d love to capture the moment when my then future husband first smiled at me. Funny thing is, that moment is captured—-in my imagination.
So Newton, who said that time is absolute and can be measured, was out-thought by Einstein who said it was not time, but light (what we observe) that is the constant.
I imagine the universe as a spiral, like an infinitely long piece of rotini. Each year on the anniversary of that first smile, I’m on a new level of that spiral. More observable stuff has happened: new cats and grandchildren are added to my spiral and people pass out of it, too. These timely events shape my universe and I am shaped by them.
Meanwhile, I’ll try to rescue my next great idea before it is sucked into the event horizon of my imagination!
--Stay curious!
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