black hole
Tag archives for black hole
Black Holes Won’t Incinerate You, After All
Posted by Ethan on March 8, 2013 
“You wait for a gem in an endless sea of blah.” -Lawrence Grossman On the one hand, we have General Relativity, our theory of space, time, and gravity. It describes the Universe on both large and small scales perfectly, from the hot Big Bang to our cold accelerating expansion, from vast superclusters of galaxies down…
How can we see black holes?
Posted by Ethan on February 6, 2013 
“According to the special theory of relativity nothing can travel faster than light, so that if light cannot escape, nothing else can either. The result would be a black hole: a region of space-time from which it is not possible to escape to infinity.” -Stephen Hawking You may have encountered objects that are the same…
A Spectacular Chance for Gravitational Waves
Posted by Ethan on August 21, 2012 
“There is a single light of science, and to brighten it anywhere is to brighten it everywhere.” -Isaac Asimov One of the most spectacular and successful ideas of the 20th Century was Einstein’s General Relativity, or the idea that matter and energy determines the curvature of spacetime, and the curvature of spacetime in turn determines…
Practically Everything Leaves Something Behind
Posted by Ethan on May 28, 2012 
“Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people…
A Little Baby… Supernova?
Posted by Ethan on May 21, 2008 We know, more or less how supernovae work. We’ve seen them just hours after they first go off through telescopes and satellites. The Crab Nebula, also known as M1, was a supernova that went off nearly 1,000 years ago in our own galaxy, for example, and we can simulate pretty well that it formed like…
Carnival Of Space: Movie Edition
Posted by Ethan on May 1, 2008 The one-year anniversary edition of the Carnival of Space is up at Why Homeschool? If only more homeschoolers were into space, Astronomy, and science in general, the United States would be a far superior place, I’m sure! Thanks to Henry Cate for starting the Carnival and coming back to host it one year later! My…
Black Hole Kicked Out of Galaxy
Posted by Ethan on April 29, 2008 No, not because it was too young to drink! Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics were looking at some X-ray objects, and discovered something really weird: a very bright X-ray source moving out of a galaxy at nearly 3,000 kilometers/second! This thing is a goner. If our Sun were moving at even…
Do all Stars Eventually Explode?
Posted by Ethan on April 7, 2008 What’s going to happen to all the stars in the Universe as they get older? Well, just as nothing can live forever, stars can’t live forever also. Why? Because they run on fuel: burning hydrogen into helium, for example. When they run out of fuel, something’s gotta give. Barbara Ryden reminds us of an excellent…
How to make a Black Hole
Posted by Ethan on February 6, 2008 You and I have lived on planet Earth long enough to know that if you want to launch something into space, it needs to travel fast enough to escape the pull of Earth’s gravity. Launch it with too slow of a speed, and it crashes back into Earth. Launch it with a little more speed,…
