What the F*ck is a Black Hole?

A black hole is basically just a giant goddamn angry hole in spacetime. Black holes have such an intense gravitational pull, nothing can escape them, not even light, leaving only what appears to be a hole in space. At the center of a black hole lies a singularity of infinite density, surrounded by its event horizon. A singularity is like an angry old hillbilly sitting on his porch with a shotgun—don’t get too close or he’ll shoot at you, and probably yell racial slurs. The event horizon marks the point of no return, anything that occurs beyond this point will never be seen to an outside observer, it is forever lost to the unquenchable singularity. Black holes are (typically) born when a star has exhausted all its juice-box reserves (thermonuclear sources of energy). Once it’s out of this energy, a sufficiently massive and compressed star will literally collapse in on itself—forming the most chaotic object in the known universe.

Since 1968 when John Wheeler coined the term “black hole” (this f*cking guy is apparently great at naming things, he also came up with the term “wormhole”), the research surrounding them has come quite a long way. We now know black holes are actually quite common in the universe. Some of them are believed to be primordial, meaning they’ve been around since the beginning of time. Some of them are even theorized to have started out as lil microscopic black holes, eventually growing into supermassive bastards over millions of years. Scientists believe a whopping majority of galaxies revolve around black holes, with our own galaxy recently being confirmed to be orbiting a supermassive black hole.

Entropy

The characteristics of a black hole, though still complex, are simple when compared with their other friends. Their three primary features are mass, electric charge, and rotation momentum. These basic characteristics are why physicists coined the phrase, “they have no hair”—which simply means they lack individuality. Once you’ve studied one, you’ve pretty much studied them all.

Now this doesn’t mean black holes aren’t unique as f*ck. Of all the shitstorms our universe contains, black holes hold the shitstorm gold medal. They have the highest entropy of anything in the known universe. Here’s an example of why black holes are master shitstormers. Say you’re a mad scientist and you want to create something with more chaos (entropy) than a black hole. You build a hollow sphere that’s roughly the same size as a black hole, and fill it with a bunch of different gasses: helium, hydrogen, so on. You would think, given the means to continuously pump that shit full of gas, it would eventually surpass the raw chaos of a black hole. But, instead of surpassing it, as the sphere continues to fill and the interactions become more chaotic, it will become a black hole. Black holes have a monopoly on disorder.

Fun fact: Not only do they enjoy mass chaos, the singularity of a black hole is the only object capable of reaching near-zero size, and infinite density. A black hole’s singularity can reach the smallest number possible, known as a Planck length—which is smaller than an atomic nucleus.

Falling into a Black Hole

Have you ever worked any form of customer service? Well then, you can skip this section because you already know what it feels like to be constantly falling into a black hole.

Exactly what would happen if you fell into a black hole? This idea has been poked at by numerous different physicists and science buffs, but the conclusion is always the same—you’d be stretched out like a spaghetti noodle, and then you’d f*cking die. Once you’ve passed over the event horizon, the already strong tidal forces of the black hole are so ridiculously powerful your body is “stretched” out, which is known as spaghettification (yes, this is the actual scientific term).

Though it sounds excruciating, it’s not quite as painful as you would imagine (honestly, the tedious journey up to that point sounds far more exhausting). For example, the supermassive black hole at the center of the elliptical galaxy M87 is the largest black hole ever discovered, with a size of 3 billion solar masses. A free fall into this black hole would take 5 ½ hours, but the actual spaghettification would only be about 0.09 seconds. So, for the most part, the journey would probably be breathtaking, and then sort of boring, and then ohp, you’re dead.

Conclusion

Black holes are certainly some of the coolest things the universe has to offer. They eat entire stars for breakfast and shit all over light. What exactly happens when matter is absorbed into the singularity is still uncertain, it could potentially come out “the other end”, the theoretical white hole. Our current understanding of black holes has come a long way since Schwarzschild found a solution to Einstein’s field equations, but there’s still quite a lot we don’t understand about these angry bastards.

(Originally posted on Tumblr)

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