Black holes are stranger than anything dreamed up by science fiction writers, but they are firmly matters of scientific fact. Although the concept has been around for more than 200 years, the quantum physics and mathematics that support black holes are esoteric at best. The real question is – how much do we truly understand?
Neil deGrasse Tyson Explains Wormholes and Black Holes [Business Insider] by Neil deGrasse Tyson
Video (2 minutes)
“You want to avoid black holes. Really. At all cost.”
Stephen Hawking Believes He’s Solved a Huge Mystery About Black Holes [Washington Post] by Rachel Feltman
Article (5 minutes) and Video (9 minutes)
“According to Hawking’s idea, the particles that enter a black hole leave traces of their information on the event horizon. When particles come back out — in a phenomenon called Hawking Radiation — they carry some of that information back out, preserving it. Technically, anyway.”
The Hunt for a Supermassive Black Hole [TED] by Andrea Ghez
Video (16 minutes)
“Despite the fact that I’m going to talk to you about an object that’s supermassive, it has no finite size. So this is a little tricky…”
Wrinkles in Spacetime: The Warped Astrophysics of Interstellar [WIRED] by Adam Rogers
Article (8 minutes)
“The more massive something is, the more gravity it produces. Objects like stars and black holes do this so powerfully that they actually bend light and pull space and time with it. And it gets weirder: If you were closer to a black hole than I was, our perceptions of space and time would diverge. Relatively speaking, time would seem to be going faster for me.”
The Birth of a Black Hole, Live [Symmetry] by Lauren Biron
Article (5 minutes)
“DUNE will look for a particular signature in the neutrinos picked up by the detector. It’s predicted that a black hole will form relatively early in a supernova. Neutrinos will be able to leave the collapse in great numbers until the black hole emerges, trapping everything—including light and neutrinos—in its grasp. In data terms, that means you’d get a big burst of neutrinos with a sudden cutoff.”
Longer Reads
- Death by Black Hole: And Other Cosmic Quandaries by Neil deGrasse Tyson
- A Black Hole Is Not a Hole by Carolyn Cinami DeCristofano
- Exploring Black Holes: Introduction to General Relativity by Edwin F. Taylor & John Archibald Wheeler
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