| ____ |
𝕬𝖑𝖑 𝕮𝖔𝖓𝖘𝖚𝖒𝖎𝖓𝖌 The window of her home is open, cooling the house on this warm summer night. Her mother is sorting out bills and invoices, and her father is at his usual spot by the unlit fireplace working on one of his wooden carvings. The telly flickers on and Sinclair sits back on the couch, curled up with a bowl of chilled berries from the garden.
--This brings us to our next subject, the black hole. There is something chilling about the phrase “black hole”. It suggests nothingness, incites feelings of danger; and alludes to something that could pull us in and entrap us. A place where time means nothing, with mind-blowing qualities that we struggle to grasp...--
Sinclair's eyes narrow, chewing with her hand lingering on the berries in her bowl, eyes glued to the screen. She was caught off guard. The BBC Earth channel often was fun but she didn't quite expect this, having expected animals. Where time means...nothing?
"Dear, what's that on the telly?" Her mum calls from the dining table, surrounded by sheets of paper.
"...Uh.. Some science... space program... about space," Sinclair answers absentmindedly, her eyes fixated on the graphic of a simulation of an astronaut being sucked into a black hole. The expression on her face slowly turns into one of dislike.
--So, what would happen if you fell into a black hole? Before we answer that, we must understand...--
Sinclair's lips slowly purse as she watches the simulated astronaut get torn apart and turned into spaghetti, and her stomach begins to feel a little funny. The program talks about how black holes are made from dead stars that collapse on themselves, the three types of black holes...
--The forces at play there are so immense that science can’t agree about what happens next. Einstein’s general relativity says that when matter is pulled into a black hole, its information is destroyed – but quantum mechanics says that cannot happen...--
So which is it?? Is it destroyed or is it not? The thought of something so... all-devouring and inescapable clutched Sinclair's throat, but she couldn't look away. She kept watching.. and eating her berries in slight stress.
--So, the big question – what would happen if you fell into a black hole? Well, the prognosis isn’t great, to be truthful, whichever sort of black hole you picked.--
Sinclair watches the screen, her expression twisted into a mixture of disgust and disdain.
--If you leapt heroically into a stellar-mass black hole, your body would be subjected to a process called ‘spaghettification’ (no, really, it is). The black hole’s gravity force would compress you from top to toe, while stretching you at the same time…thus, spaghetti.--
The girl didn't have anything to comment on, but if she did, she would've been left speechless as the simulation of that astronaut turning into spaghetti played again. Feeling her face go a little pale, her head drops and she notices she'd eaten all the berries.
--A supermassive black hole has a slightly less horrendous effect, so let’s imagine then that you opt for one of these to make your giant leap for mankind and scientific research... ...You would be able to see out from inside, but no-one would be able to see you because any light would fall back on you. The good news is that although the gravitational pull is much stronger than smaller black holes, the stretching tidal force is less, meaning you won’t be turned into spaghetti. But the bad news is you wouldn’t be able to get out….--
Maybe she shouldn't be watching this. Sinclair watches as the narrator continues to talk about how if a black hole sucks things in, something called a white hole could theoretically spit them out again. Then some info about wormholes and time moving differently in black holes, and how billions of years could pass by in milliseconds....which rather freaked her out. The narrator then spoke about a "tidal disruption."
--It was caused by a star that had come too close to a black hole at the centre of a galaxy, about 290 million light years away. It was distorted, stretched, and shredded as it was sucked into the singularity, while the residue of the destroyed star was flung out in a ‘cosmic belch’.--
A whole star....was just shredded into nothingness. Snuffed out like nothing from that distance.
Sinclair's lips pursed harder, her breaths more shallow than usual. This was..... a mistake. She shouldn't be watching this. Despite the rather approachable choice of words and language the narrator used to make things seem interesting and fun, combined with this growing, looming fear of something so unavoidable, it just made it even worse. Having been taught to take matters into her own hands, being confronted by something so unfathomable shed a new light on the 12 year old's view of the world.
|
____ |
