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Originally posted by stingc
I do theoretical work in general relativity. So I don't go looking for black holes etc., but work out their (expected) properties, and things related to that.
Recently, I've been looking into the gravitational self-force/radiation reaction problem. An accelerated object will emit gravitational radiation (like a charge will emit light). This carries away energy, so the object will feel a force due to its own radiation. It turns out to be very difficult to work this out properly, but its understanding it has a lot of interesting implications.
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Wow, that's amazing. Congrats on being one of the few people in the world that actually challanges their mind on a regular basis. What did you take in school to land something like that? Also, if you don't mind, what is the company you work for?
Quote:
Originally posted by SpikeQX99
Science is hard...
But cool..
Supermassive black holes... Maybe if when we think about it, the answer is like a toilet? We are on the outskirts, whirling around in circles till one day we finally make it in to the center of the black hole, then down the drain we go?
Hmm....
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I'll sum up what I believe a black hole is. Though, like i have stated, I'm no expert on black holes. stingc would probably be able to give us a much better explanation of a black hole.
Basically a black hole is something that has such an intense gravitational force that it even traps light.
Now, black holes to reside at the centre of galaxies, but it doesn't mean that we are going to be sucked into that black hole. We are so far from the black hole at the centre of our galaxy that it's gravitational pull doesn't have any effect on us at all.
Our orbit in our galaxy isn't influenced by the black hole at the centre. Rather, it's influenced by the cluster of stars and the overall gravitational force of everything in our galaxy combined.
Again, I don't know a whole lot about the makeup of galaxies, or how they came to be, but I do know that we don't have to worry about being sucked into the black hole at the centre of our galaxy. That gives you an idea of how large our galaxy is, and how large this new black hole finding is, also.
However, it is possible that there is a black hole close to us. This wouldn't be a supermassive black hole. It would be small, but 'could' gobble up our solar system, if we got close enough. Though, it would take a long time for it to finally reach our planet. We would be warned of the black hole way ahead of time.
In other words, we can't really think of it as your toilet scenerio. It's an interesting thought, and kind of works for objects in the range of the black holes gravity, but the matter is just condenced and accelerated to speeds higher than the speed of light, or so people think. This is where many questions about black holes come into play. Relativity suggests that nothing with a mass can go the speed of light. If it does, it's mass will be infinite, since your mass increases as you move faster, it's speed of time would be 0, and the energy it would take to get to that speed would also be infinite. It's very hard to think about.
Black holes are very interesting for many reasons.
If you are interested in astronomy, this is a great site to go for definitions of things.
www.bbc.co.uk/science/space