Getting Acquainted With the Strangeness of Black Holes

Almost every other researcher and scientist that has been working in the field of astronomy is fascinated with the concept of black holes. One of the latest fascinating stories about these structures was recently reported by a team that was able to discover a very rare “middleweight” black hole. It is a known fact that a few black holes are just a few times of our Sun in terms of mass, but there are others whose mass is more than one billion times of this star. Then there are a few others that have intermediate mass like say 2200 times of the Sun which was recently discovered in a cluster of stars called 47 Tucanae. The existence of black holes has been confirmed again and again by scientists and researchers with powerful telescopes. Recently, they reported collision between two black holes that led to emission of gravitational waves that were detected with a LIGO instrumentation installed in United States.

the Strangeness of Black Holes

Black Holes are very intense objects that have mind-blowing density. If Sun has to transform into a black hole it will have to turn into a black hole by contracting from its current 1.4 million km radius to just 3km. The normal density inside this so called “Schwarzschild Radius” will be approx. 20 billion tons every cubic centimeter. The most dangerous thing about these is that these have intense pull of gravity and you can’t risk getting closer to these anywhere. On our planet, the strength of gravitational pull that is holding you to the surface is same for your feet as your head. But if you ever go near a black hole, the difference between gravitational pull of your feet and head will be so wide that it will pull you apart completely and stretch you apart completely up to an atomic level. The process for the latter is called as spaghettification. The boundary around these black holes is a unidirectional membrane which is perfect in every aspect. It is a completely intangible surface that encapsulates a sphere of no return. Once you are inside this sphere, the gravitational pull will be too large to escape even for a light rays.