Q&A on Black Holes!

I want to answer 2 main questions I keep seeing my viewers asking. Sure, this blog beats the black hole horse long after its died, but has it ever truly died. We definitely don't know as much as we would like to about black holes.  We can only gather so much information from the event horizon we actually see.

Question:
Why can we see a black hole if a black hole cant be seen?

Answer:
We can see them because of something called the event horizon. The event horizon is actually the boundary at which escape velocity is greater than the speed of light. This however, isn't the most true of statements. It is better described as the paths that light could take and all paths in the forward light cones of particles inside horizon become changed and warped so that light is redirected into the black hole. Once a particle is caught inside of the horizon, it is theoretically impossible for it to escape. There is no other option but to be pulled into it further. We can see this which indicates there is a black hole.



Question:
Where does a black hole lead to?

Answer:
We really have no evidence to back anything up however we have theories of something called a white hole. The math has potential of explaining this. In nature, it never seems plausible that something is just gone. We believe it has to be somewhere. The white hole fixes the mysteries by predicting that the particles do expel from a white hole at extraordinary speeds. We may have even witnessed one of these and confused it with a supernova. We believe these will pop in and out of existence, so it is most likely impossible to predict when one may occur.

Question:
If there is a black hole in the Milky Way, why aren't we pulled in?

Answer:
The simple answer is that we are in a spiral galaxy, and we are far enough out in one of the arms that we would not need worry. It takes roughly 200 million years to make one rotation around the super massive black hole at the galactic center of our own Milky Way. I suppose that by the time we even made one rotation around it, humanity would have been gone, whether we died off, or escaped our planet earth and are well spread across the stars. There is however an interesting event predicted to happen as a gas cloud will enter the Black Hole in 2013.

Black Hole in the Milky Way?

The moon is pulled by the earth and that is pulled by the sun but whats the sun pulled by? Well its pulled by a black hole sucking us in constantly. Why aren't we sucked in? The way gravity works its unlikely that we will be soon. It is more likely the sun will die before we ever get in there.

In fact, just as a star has a life zone, or area in which life could survive, the galaxy has one as well. Pretty interesting to know that everyone of these has hundreds of stars, which have a bunch of planets, which have earthlike qualities. The chances of us finding more of great value are great.

A picture of the center of the milky way galaxy from nasa.

Just a Thought:
however scary it may be.

There are so many scary thoughts when we think of the universe as a whole. Every morning we wake up and go about our day without a thought in the world thsat there will ever be a huge disaster that will cause an entire planet to die. Unfortunately however possible it is, we are getting to the point to prevent huge disasters like that.

This makes it ever more important to make sure as humanity learns about the universe, we must start looking for a new place to stay. Our population has exploded since the black plague and industrial revolution. Our resources are quickly depleting. Cities are even running into water problems. Water is the most important part of life. If we start running out of that, then there could be even bigger problems then the oil crisis.

Who knows, we could even find a planet that has a large amount of gold which is a rare metal that always increases in value because of how important it is. There can only be benefits from extending outside of our planet and colonize.

It would make us safer. It would make the human population more wealthy. We could actually start trying to restore our planet once we get alot of the population to a better place. Of course this is all a long way off but we need to start the ball rolling as soon as possible!