Blackhole - one small hole in an image but a lot whole for the science!!!

Hello Science lovers! I am a little late in sharing about this but however, congratulations! We are the first generation of the mankind to witness this historic event. I have been literally waiting for years for a major scientific breakthrough to happen, and not just any simple breakthrough, but a kind of breakthrough that becomes a global phenomenon. Such a breakthrough is what we are experiencing now, the proof of a black hole’s existence is now available, thanks to the team who have worked on this entirely, who observed these for years, who created an algorithm to process and stitch the images of black hole taken by the event horizon telescopes. 20 years of hardwork has been put into this and the result is worth the work and wait. I know this blog has nothing to do with science but hey, what’s life without science? I was very much interested in science as a child, especially gastronomy, hehe sorry I mean astronomy, it is just fascinating. If I were flamed towards science when my brains were growing, maybe I would have become a scientist or an astronomer, who knows, but I was just one Albert Einstein brain away. Haha. I know dumb joke. Anyways back to the black hole.

First Captured Image of Blackhole

When the search for this blackhole had started, scientists had figured that to make a picture of the blackhole it would take a giant earth size telescope to do that and that would take like decades of years to manufacture. So instead of waiting for the technology to develop, they came up with a simple solution of using eight radio telescopes in four different continents, named as the Event horizon telescopes. So as the earth rotates, the blackhole is captured from different angles. Is it that easy to capture? No. The event horizon telescope uses a technique called as a very long baseline interferometry (VLBI) which helps in observing systems far far away, in the case of our blackhole on the length of 1.3mm wave. To put in layman’s words it provides a resolution just enough to read a newspaper in new York from Paris. But does this technology make it easy to capture? Again, No. Sometime blackholes can be very huge in mass, even billion times bigger than the sun for an instance, but they can be only 17 times wide. And how does it make it difficult to capture? Imagine you are trying to capture and resolve a fruit in the moon from earth. Can you see the challenge in it? Now Imagine the challenge of capturing an entirely dark object only 17 times wide and millions of light years away, to resolve such a miniscule image you need a telescope the size of the entire earth which is why they came up with idea of all these telescopes working together as one giant telescope to render a precise image.

How far is this black hole? This blackhole is 55 million light years away from the earth and has a mass of 6.5 billion times of our sun found in the Messier 87 or simply called as M87 galaxy in the Virgo cluster. Yay way to go Virgos! But did you know, the scientists where actually in search of an another blackhole and they luckily came across this. Well it was not just any dumb luck to be honest. Many have questioned if travelling at lightspeed to reach the black hole would be possible if the technology were created, even if we had a space rocket that can travel at that speed, it would still take 55 million years for us to reach there and the black hole may not even exist at that moment.

The Scientists behind the first image of Blackhole

Wait, First of all what is this black hole? Blackholes are one of the most extreme environment in the universe. Black holes can be either rotating or non-rotating, but according to the theory, they either way have a gravitational singularity that lies at the centre. It was a thought experiment hundreds of years ago but with a fantastical imagination by Einstein when he came up with his theory of relativity, there was no proof at that time it was only discussed as an intellectual argument. What he says is matter can get crushed to a point and space-time effectively spills towards to the crushed centre. All forms of matter and energy bend space and time, and light and matter follow those curves. Temperature and pressure would be so extremely high with insanely powerful gravity, that we can never imagine. If an organic matter were to go through it, it would shred it in Nano seconds. The gravity of the black hole is so high that even light cannot escape through it and hence the name “Black hole”. If there is anything in this world that can survive that I am sure it would look like nothing we would recognize on Earth.

Gravity so strong that even light cannot escape through it? Really? Let me help you with your visual imagination. Think of black hole as a planet not made out of rocks or ice or magma but made out of gravity. We walk on earth because of gravity, our buildings don’t fall on earth because of gravity and I can say so on. Let’s say the percentage of gravity on Earth is 90% so that you get an idea how 90% gravity feels like. Now imagine you are walking on the moon. The percentage of gravity on the moon is only 16% when compared to that of earth. So that’s why you can’t walk on moon like you do on earth, you hop and bounce like a bunny rabbit because the gravity is at its lightest. For another example we all know the feather and coin experiment, if there were higher gravity, the feather would fall to the ground as fast as the coin. Similarly, each planet or a star has its own gravity, and all these percentages are compared to the percentage of the earth’s gravity which is 90%. It can be a 100% or 200% or 1000% or 100000000% or more. It differs for everything take mars for instance, its percentage is 38 compared to that of earth while the sun’s gravity is 333000 multiple times of earth’s gravity due to its huge mass. Can you imagine how big of a gravity is that? That’s why our whole system revolves around the sun. Now let’s calculate the total amount of gravity in our system. Let sun be A, Mercury be B, Venus as C, Earth as D, Mars E so on. The total amount of gravity of solar system is A+B+C+D+E+F+G+H+I which equals to Z. There are plenty of other systems like ours, so lets calculate keeping in mind that other systems would have similar gravity amount Z. So millions and millions of system’s gravity add up to millions and millions of Z. Let the added up values of Z equal to Y and Y would be the total gravity for our milky way galaxy. Now there are many more galaxies like our milky way, Andromeda, NGC 6744 etc. Let the total gravity of the collective of galaxies Y adds up to the value X. We now get the idea how huge the value of X is. Now a black hole is made out of so intense gravity that not even light can escape through it. Scientists did not come up with it so that it can be used as a tag line, they say that because they actually mean it. The value X of gravity can or may form only 0.1% of the blackhole’s gravity power. Mind blown, isn’t it?

Now I am going to be answering some of the most commonly asked questions to me.

Q:What does this black hole do?

A:Well, what does a vacuum cleaner do? It sucks all the dust. Likewise the black hole is a giant vacuum cleaner, so powerful that it can suck light. If a planet where to be sucked by the black hole it can disintegrate into seconds and be gone without a trace. This strong gravity occurs because ginormous matter has been compressed into small tiny space, yeah like our closets.

Q:How is a black hole formed?

A:The most often observed is when a dying star is completely burnt out, heavy enough to have powerful gravity overcomes intrinsic resistance and then the stars collapses upon itself, or two neutron stars colliding or an exploding star. But it is said that most blackholes date back to the formation of the galaxy and the big bang. It hasn’t been visible these many years because there weren’t enough technology to deduct it, they are basically invisible because no light can escape through it.

Q:How big can these black holes be?

A:It totally depends on its mass and size. It can be as heavy as the Everest and still be small as a beach ball. Hence they are majorly categorized into three types. 1.Primordial 2. Stellar 3. Supermassive. The primordial black holes can be as heavy as the Everest mountain but size wise can be equal to that of an Atom, Shocking? Yes! The Stellar can be as huge as 20 times the sun in mass but still can be fit to ball of 5 mile radius. HA! Now the supermassive blackholes are the kind which have masses bigger than one million suns that is 1.9891 x 10 to the power of 36 kilograms and just as big as our solar system. Imagine that! Studies show that each galaxy may have a supermassive blackhole at its centre. Good luck not getting sucked into that.

Q:Can a black hole suck Earth into it?

A:Technically yes, but the chances are highly unlikely. Black holes don’t roam around the universe swallowing everything that comes their way like Pacman. They have Gravity laws to follow or if not get arrested by gravity police. Unless or until a new black hole happens to be formed inside our solar system so powerful to gobble every planet and our star, it is not happening, that would just be one in a zillion ways to die. If you are wondering if our sun could become a blackhole, the answer is no. Sun does not have enough mass to become a blackhole, when its energy is burnt out it would become a red giant and that when that part of it is burnt out as well it would become a white dwarf star.

Q:How are the black holes deducted?

A:By using advanced telescopes and technology. Black holes are black and invisible but each blackhole has a surrounding ring like boundary known as the Event Horizon that essentially marks the point of no return. Any matter that has crossed the point of Event Horizon gets shredded and heated up so much and hence the bright burning which makes the event horizon. Anything that reaches that point is expected to get sucked towards its singularity with no hope of escaping again.

Q:Can Blackholes hold life?

A:There are places in our own planet where life exists which we thought we be impossible. We can only apply Schrodinger’s cat theory to it, we will never know unless we open the box. So even if there were life inside black hole, it would be nothing like we know.

Is there a tesseract inside the blackhole like in the movie Interstellar? No. According to the movie Interstellar’s script a fourth dimensional object tesseract was placed inside the Black hole by Fifth dimensional entities. A square in two dimension is a cube in three dimension which is a tesseract in fourth dimension. It was a scientific but creative fiction interpretation by Christopher Nolan. As our third dimensional world cannot contain a fourth dimension object its been placed inside the black hole. Doesn’t necessarily mean all black holes contain tesseract. Like a box being placed inside your room, doesn’t mean that all rooms contain boxes.

Q:What happens if we go inside a black hole?

A:First of all, organic matter cannot survive such heavy gravity, even if it could we would be stretched like spaghetti to a point where we would just snap and this process is called Spaghettification. But honestly, we would never know until we go. So, all we need to do is wait.

I hope you all enjoyed this post on blackhole, if you like to read more of my view on science or any other subject send me a message or a mail regarding the subject and I will write it down for you.

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