What Happens to You in a Black Hole?

Black holes are so massive they deform space and time, so dense their centers are called "points at infinity," and are absolutely black because even light can't escape them. 

So what would happen if you were sucked into one?

If you were to step into a black hole, your body would most closely resemble "toothpaste being extruded out of the tube," says Charles Liu, an astrophysicist who works at the American Museum of Natural History's Hayden Planetarium.

According to LiveScience.com:

"First of all, you approach the speed of light as you fall into the black hole. So the faster you move through space, the slower you move through time," Liu said. "Furthermore, as you fall, there are things that have been falling in front of you that have experienced an even greater 'time dilation' than you have. So if you're able to look forward toward the black hole, you see every object that has fallen into it in the past. And then if you look backwards, you'll be able to see everything that will ever fall into the black hole behind you.  

"So the upshot is, you'll get to see the entire history of that spot in the universe simultaneously," he said, "from the Big Bang all the way into the distant future."

Liu also explains the effects of other universal forces such as relativity on the hapless person who would encounter a black hole.

Click here for the complete description. 

Could the Higgs Boson Travel Back in Time?

The Hadron Collider's superconducting solenoid magnet.

There’s been no shortage of bizarre hypotheses surrounding the Large Hadron Collider located near Geneva, but the New York Times this week publicized the strangest of all. In essence, if the $9 billion collider can actually produce the Higgs boson, it could ….

Well, here’s the way the Times put it:

A pair of otherwise distinguished physicists have suggested that the hypothesized Higgs boson, which physicists hope to produce with the collider, might be so abhorrent to nature that its creation would ripple backward through time and stop the collider before it could make one, like a time traveler who goes back in time to kill his grandfather.

The scientists in question are Holger Bech Nielsen of the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, and Masao Ninomiya of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics in Kyoto, Japan.

“It must be our prediction that all Higgs producing machines shall have bad luck,” Dr. Nielsen said in an e-mail message. In an unpublished essay, Dr. Nielson said of the theory, “Well, one could even almost say that we have a model for God.” It is their guess, he went on, “that He rather hates Higgs particles, and attempts to avoid them."

If you’re a fan of science fiction or even of science that’s stranger than fiction, you’ll no doubt be intrigued with what Nielsen and Ninomiya say on the matter.

Click here for the New York Times article.

'Intermediate' Black Hole Finally Discovered

Artist's rendition of the newly discovered black hole.

Confronted with the existence of only two categories of black holes in space ~ small and super-massive ~ astrophysicists have long speculated there must be something in between.

And apparently they were right.

According to Wired magazine, astrophysicists recently identified what appears to be the first-ever medium-sized black hole, with a mass at least 500 times that of our Sun. Researchers from the Centre d’Etude Spatiale des Rayonnements in France detected the middling hole in a galaxy about 290 million light-years from Earth.

According to Wired magazine:

The discovery may shed some light on the origins of super-sized black holes like the one at the center of our own galaxy. These astral heavyweights top out at several million to several billion times the mass of the Sun, but their origin remains a mystery.

Small black holes, between three and 20 times the mass of the sun, are created when big stars collapse and leave behind a gravitational pull strong enough to block nearby light rays. Researchers have speculated that super-massive black holes result from the successive fusion of many smaller black holes. But without finding evidence of a medium-size hole, it was a tough theory to prove.

The new discovery is the most convincing evidence to date that medium black holes exist. Using the European Space Agency’s XMM-Newton X-ray space telescope, the researchers identified a radiation source that gives off X-rays 260 million times brighter than the radiation of the Sun.

Click here for the Wired article.