Black Hole Image
Happy weekend friends!
I came across this video and I thought it was really cool. Now… it’s going to be VERY FAR above an 8th grade level of understanding, here… this man’s YouTube audience is most likely astrophysics majors in college who have taken many high level science classes about space, physics, math, etc. However, some of the things he’s saying here can be related to what we’ve been talking about.
Do you remember how I said sometimes light acts like a wave, and sometimes light acts like matter? In our unit we just consider light to be a wave so that we can study its properties in that sense. However, this video talks about light when we think of it like matter. Matter with no mass. Isn’t that weird? (The definition of matter is that it has to have mass and take up space… but light doesn’t do or have either of those things.) However in his description of what is happening around our galaxy’s black hole, he talks about this concept.
In a nutshell:
- There is a black hole at the center of our galaxy. Black holes have so much mass and so much gravity, not even light can escape them. (That’s why they’re “black” holes.) Since no light can escape, we’ve never been able to “see” one (it makes AND reflects light, but that light can’t escape).
- There is a radius (circle) around the black hole where nothing at all can escape… and then there is a radius where light can escape but not other matter. And then there’s a 3rd radius where matter can orbit the black hole without getting sucked into it. Our planet and our solar system are beyond that 3rd radius, allowing us to slowly revolve around the black hole along with millions of other stars. From that 3rd radius to the edge of our galaxy is called our “accretion disk.” And most of the things floating around in it are either gas, dust, or stars and planets like the ones in our solar system.
- We will NEVER see light or matter that had gone inside the radius where things cannot escape. They are pulled with such force that they are gone forever.
- The radius where light can escape but not matter is very interesting. Here, we can see light behaving like a particle or matter. It is actually revolving around the black hole as well, here. The man in the video explains that if somehow you could stand at this ring and look in front of you, you would see the back of your head because the light would reflect off of your head and revolve around the black hole to your eyes. SO COOL!
- However, what happens basically is that all the stars from our disk of matter floating around the hole that are behind it are shining light towards us.
- The effect is kind of like being in a movie theater and somebody stands up in front of you. You can’t see what they look like, but you can see their shape because the light from the screen behind them can’t pass through their body.
- Obviously it is more complicated than that. Photons of light are bent as they pass around the radius of the black hole.
It took literally hundreds of astrophysicists to collect telescope data to create this one image!
Here is the image…
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Seems underwhelming given how much scientific data was used to collect it…
(Each of these is a hard drive filled with data collected to make the one image.)