Anybody Love Black Holes?

[/)eathKiller]

Black Dwarves are cooler, because like Deugar, if you put anything on their surface it immediatley gets flattened

[Azred]

Originally posted by Heartless Butterscotch: I think someone mentioned Stephen Hawking. His book, "A Brief History of Time : From the Big Bang to Black Holes" can be had at your local library. You'll get an "A" for effort just for attempting to understand his work.

I agree; it is quite a good read. It is certainly much more plausible than superstring theory or this one guy (I forget his name) who thinks that the gravitational constant (as we know it) is not constant, thus explaining why there are discrepancies between the mass of the observible universe and why galaxies expand apart. But that is neither here nor there....
On the other hand, A Brief History of Time isn't as much fun as brane theory....

[Bahamut]

Damn!!!! This is good stuff!!

Thanks guys!!!

Now, for those who still have info (I'll also try to get that Stephen Hawkins book) please do post it! I already know I have passed this thingee, but I want to get into thee Dean's list... and you guys are helping me [img]smile.gif[/img]

[Thoran]

Hawking IMO is one of the most readable of the great Physicists. As a summer assignment for our 11 year old we had him read most of "A Theory of Everything" and answer some basic questions about each chapter.

I especially enjoyed reading some of his theories applying Quantum Mechanics (specifically Uncertainty) to explain how information could escape black holes (empirical measurements have been taken that are consistant with the existance of this phenemona).

To put together some of the info here that seemed a bit disjointed:

X-rays are emitted by matter spiralling into a black hole... this energy is emitted BEFORE the matter crosses the event horizon, because if it was emitted after... it wouldn't escape either.

A Neutron Star is a star that was massive enough to go supernova but not massive enough to collapse into a black hole. It does collapse under it's own gravity, but that gravity is only strong enough to force the electrons and protons to form into neutrons. The term "singularity" does not apply to Neutron Stars since they have size (they don't reduce to a single point in space)

White Dwarfs are formed by stars too small to go supernova (like our sun)

One cool theory - for supermassive black holes it's entirely possible that a person crossing the event horizon wouldn't even know it. The event horizon for these beasts is a LONG way away from the singularity, and the gravitational gradiant at that point would be fairly low.

[ 11-25-2002, 02:05 PM: Message edited by: Thoran ]

[Bahamut]

btw, what is the black hole's heat capacity? oh well... too lazy to research tonight... buh...

[Cyril Darkcloud]

Looks like quite a bit of the basic info has already been provided. There have, however, been quite a few intriguing developments in this area recently -- especially in terms of what astronomers and astro-physicists have been able to observe and infer concerning black holes. A good summary can be found here. As an added bonus, the articles on this site feature a number of very well-done computer graphics as well as images from both the Hubble and Chandra telescopes.