Black Holes
It’s a force, previous energy, powerful, to wit:
A nearby star can be drawn into it.
Astrophysicists have wondered if there are any?
And now we are finding that there may be many.
And some are close.
© Forrest W. Heaton March 2023
March 2023. Yes 2023. That’s when I began researching what are known as “black holes.” I’m only now getting around to publishing this.
Horizon. A brief reminder: In our blog we write about Poetry, Parks, People, and Planet. This post is on Planet. We encourage you to expand your horizon and think about space. It will be more in the news in the years to come and we will try to help our readers be well ahead of the trend.
Dormant. Don’t know much or anything about black holes? Well, there may be more than one of you out there. Don’t beat yourself up too badly. By researching this topic, we’ve learned some things. For example, we’ve learned every astrophysicist is an astronomer . . . but not every astronomer is an astrophysicist. Did you know that? We hadn’t even thought of it. Astrophysicists tend to focus on the origin and evolution of the universe while astronomers tend to focus on the positions and characteristics of heavenly bodies. Now, as to the reason for the publication of this blog post, a New York Times article was published 5Nov22 advising: “Astronomers find a black hole in our cosmic back yard . . . Just 1,600 light-years away, the black hole is the closest known to Earth. The good news: It’s dormant, at least for now.”
Stars. We know from the information provided by astrophysicists that stars form “when clouds of dust and gas collapse, triggering a nuclear fusion inside the dense balls of material.” But we’re not sure we (and most of our readers) fully grasp the meaning of this announcement, so we thought we’d spend a few moments on this with you.
Our Sun. We’ve a pretty good grasp on the fact that our sun is similar to most of the stars in the universe. One day it will exhaust all its fuel and die out and that it’s doubtful we’ll be aware of that demise. At that point, we believe it will become a “black hole.” Humans may have a different name for them by then. Now, back to the announcement. The black hole just discovered and announced “is a biggie, a shell of yawning emptiness 10 times as massive as the sun, orbiting as far from its own star as the Earth is from ours.”
Article. The article goes on to say: “Not to worry, however: This black hole is 1,600 light-years away, in the constellation Ophiuchus; the next nearest known black hole is about 3,000 light-years away in the constellation Monoceros. What sets this new black hole apart from the 20 or so others already identified in our Milky Way galaxy, besides its proximity, is that it isn’t doing anything – not drawing a nearby star to its doom, not gravitationally consuming everything nearby. Rather, the black hole is dormant, a silent killer waiting for the currents of space to feed it.”
Reason for post. The reason for highlighting this is not to scare but to help readers maintain their sense of balance amidst the enormity of the unknown in our universe. We don’t get the sense that we’ll ever know everything . . . but humans will learn so much more and hopefully have a better sense of balance--an enlarged perspective, of what is important and what is not as we go through life. We thank God for the opportunity to learn, for the astronomers/astrophysicists for studying the heavens, for the New York Times for publishing, for Mandy Heaton & Steve Erts for setting up our website (Maryand ForrestHeatonPublications.com) to post blog posts, for Izzie Myers for posting each one, and you dear readers who make all of this possible. Thank you.
www.nasa.gov Website. We encourage you to visit www.nasa.gov website often to help expand your thinking about space. It is fascinating what is going on out there while we live our life on Earth.
TV YouTube. On your TV and in YouTube there are a number of Black Hole videos which are helpful in learning about these places in the universe considered skeptically by many scientists but now apparently favorably considered by more scientists. The first we’ll mention is: “The Most Powerful Black Holes In The Universe” (focusing on the initial skepticism, and then acceptance.) The second is ”Black Holes” (focusing on acceptance.) NOVA Advises:
Some scientists have questioned their existence.
Recently considerable evidence supporting their existence has been reported along with a rather well-documented view of their characteristics.
“They have been called ‘engines of destruction’” but actually may be the governing force of the development of the universe and our creation.
-“They emit no light and are invisible.”
“They consist mostly of ‘intense gravity’ -‘gravity at its most extreme.”
“They are massive (more than three times the size of our sun (in astronomer speak: 3 solar masses) corpses of a star.”
“They have amazing energy and blast out radio waves and x rays” throughout the cosmos.
“The universe looks stable to us when in fact it is chaos out there the more we learn about it.”
“There are billions of galaxies (perhaps 100 billion to 2 trillion) out there with what we believe is a black hole in the center of each galaxy,”
“The more we learn about black holes the more mysterious they become.”
Surprised. Are any of you as surprised as I am in my research. I looked on the Milky Way and the universe with a rather fixed view of large but stable. I now find it is larger and more chaotic.