Black Holes

Now, the subject for this week's blog is fairly straight forward compared to my previous entries. Along with my original mandate, there are also a few questions about astronomy that have just been nagging at me for years, so every once in a while I might differ from my usual more exploratory approach and just go straight for the answer. This, my friends, is one of those times.

Black holes. Does anyone really know what they are? As a kid I remember hearing two things about back holes: One was that if you got too close to one, you would split apart into a million pieces, and the other was that if yo got sucked into one you would be spit back out, having aged like 90 years. We never really talked about them when we touched on black holes in astronomy in elementary school, and I always assumed that this was due to the fact that the administration had deemed them much too menacing to introduce into our curriculum. I mean just listen to the sound of it in your head: BLLAAACK HOOOLE! It just gives you shivers, doesn't it? Especially for those of us with trypophobia (don't look it up). Well, I'm a big girl now, and I want to know the scoop.
So, here's the scoop: "We're talking about something that is so dense, it is made out of pure gravity," says Justice Jones, my best friend in the whole wide world, to summarize his explanation of black holes. He speculated that the first theory I had heard about black holes as a child was legitimate, since the pull of the gravity of a black hole on the atoms of one's body would be greater than that of the atoms on each other, thus drawing them all separately into the center of the black hole. Now, you're probably thinking 'Come one, this girls BFF is not a scholarly source for scientific information'. Well, I will have you know that A: He practically is, and B: I did do some actual research. 

So, a star that is at least 10 to 15 times larger than the sun goes supernova, it leaves behind a huge mess of dust and gas and things. If there isn't any forces outside this former star, opposing the gravitational pull of that stuff, then it all just collapses in on itself...and it just keeps collapsing until it has zero volume and infinite density. I'm not kidding. I got this from the NASA site and everything. So, the gravity of this thing is so strong that even light can't escape it. That's why it is called a black hole. 
Are you any less scared of black holes now? Yeah, me neither.
But don't worry! You actually have to be pretty close to a black hole to get sucked into it. Specifically, you'd have to cross into the Shwarzchild radius. Say, for example, that our sun was a black hole, we would have to be 3km away from it to get sucked in, and the nearest black hole is many, many light years away. Relax.
Will the universe eventually get entirely consumed by black holes? In this unscientific, uneducated bloggers humble and un-researched opinion: Yes. And then we'll have another big bang and then it happen all over again, and so on, and so forth.
So, that's the story on black holes.

SOURCES

http://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/science/know_l2/black_holes.html

http://hubblesite.org/explore_astronomy/black_holes/home.html

http://www.daviddarling.info/encyclopedia/B/blackhole.html
http://scinewsblog.blogspot.com/2010/11/simulated-black-holes.html