Profiling these Suckers!
- Mohammed Mehkari
- Oct 23, 2015
- 2 min read
Today in class, my peers and I sat down to discuss the general idea and characteristics of a black hole. Black holes are a region in space where there is an extremely strong pull of gravitational force. These black holes are created upon the death of a star, where the balance between fusion and gravity is broken. This phenomenon has always seemed quite interesting to me; the idea that the star “explodes” and it collapses in on itself, creating infinite density. Pondering upon this topic for quite some time, I was able to come up with a simple demonstration that would show these characteristics of a black hole. Many people are misled that a black hole is defined by its mass. However, this statement is false, the mass of this black hole stays constant. Its radius, known as the Schwarzschild radius can vary, and this ultimately affects its density. Therefore, density plays a huge role in characterizing a black hole. So, the experiment involved wrapping aluminum foil around a balloon, then measuring its mass. Then, we poked a pin through the balloon and used our hands as the strong force of gravity to compress the balloon. The balloon in this demonstration represents the black hole. It was observed that although the balloon was getting smaller in size, the mass was constant much like the statements that were made earlier. As the density of an object is defined by its mass over volume, a smaller volume (or radius) would allow for a larger density. It should be noted that this experiment was done in A MUCH LARGER scale in comparison to a black hole. We also able to record this investigation on camera, which would be included in our final video, as well as our website. Another important idea to consider is what happens near a black hole. Does it just suck in everything, and not let anything out? NOPE. There is what’s called virtual particles that are quite active near the event horizon. These particles are broken down into a particle-anti-particle pairing. Near the event horizon, the anti-particle falls in, while the particle escapes. This results in the loss of energy for the black hole, and as a result, hawking radiation is emitted.
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