Blackhole......I also refer to it as "the office"

Seasons 1-5 were great, I'm not so sure about season 6...

Smiless, did you do any research on gamma ray bursts? It is practically a "state of the art" lesson on black holes all by itself.

As our astronomy has gotten much better, mostly with the help of Hubble, we can measure things we couldn't see before. The speed and radius of a star orbiting around a black hole tells us of it's existence. Recently, this method was used to prove the existence of the black hole in our galaxy and much more recently, indicate that it is probably a feature of all galaxies. The reason they exist is a story for another day.

Einstein obviously studied what would happen to the fabric of space time as a black hole stretched the fabric into it's void. A complex thought problem has to do with light, mass, black holes, and gravity.

All the processes we see at the event horizon of a black hole continue past the event horizon, we just can't see them. Light no longer escapes (Hawking Radiation aside) but the frictional and energy flux forces are still occuring at a decreasing "relative" rate as time slows.

Imagine a photon created by colliding matter just inside the event horizon. The directional vector of the photon is directly "out" or straight away from center of the black hole.

If the speed of light is a constant, the photon would still want to exit straight up since the curvature of space/time in all other directions would cancel out in vector mathmatics. However, the speed of light cannot change and the path cannot curve so what keeps the hole "black"?

The answer is that there is no limitation on the ability of gravity to stretch space/time so the space in with the photon is traveling is being stretched faster than the speed of light.

A photon may not exceed the speed of light but the space it occupies can be stretched towards the black hole at beyond the speed of light such that the photon thinks it is traveling forward at the speed of light while it is actually traveling backwards "relative" to us. That is what the theory of general relativity is all about.

Neither this, nor most of what I post, comes from a website.

Simply fascinating Metalwing. I will actually look for some videos and try to get a better understanding of how a black hole works. I think it helps to visualize it also while listening. Maybe I will get a better concept of the whole idea of a black hole.

To tell you the truth I think of a toilette flushing when I look at a black hole.

Thank goodness I am not in that toilette at the time

Thanks for the rich information

You didnt even read the articles I linked.

Your wrong. Hawking evaporation is exactly the mechanism by which black holes emit particles, its two different phenomena as quite_2008 pointed out, but both contradict the statements made by abra, the pretender.

Abra is wrong, he so often thinks he has all the answers from whatever web based courses he takes, then comes in here claiming to be a scientists.

You all should read more real research and less mingle pretender drivel.

Simply fascinating Metalwing. I will actually look for some videos and try to get a better understanding of how a black hole works. I think it helps to visualize it also while listening. Maybe I will get a better concept of the whole idea of a black hole.

To tell you the truth I think of a toilette flushing when I look at a black hole.

Thank goodness I am not in that toilette at the time

Thanks for the rich information

Actually, the whirlpool that is formed by a toilet is exactly like the matter falling into a black hole ... and for the same reason, i.e., gravity.

There are generally two different types of formations that we see causing black hole formation or growth. One is the collapse of a large star internally as gravity overwhelms the pressure needed to keep it in a gaseous, plasmatic state. The hydrogen fuel runs out and the star contracts as the heat needed to keep the atoms apart lessens. The electrons are crushed by gravity into the protons creating a massive shock wave. The protons are converted into neutrons and a trememdous blast of neutrinos blows the star to smithereens.

Most people think supernova are thermonuclear explosions when, in reality, the steady burning of the star is a thermonuclear explosion and the supernova is a gravitational collapse of matter creating a neutrino shockwave which is the actual explosion.

If the star is big enough for it's death to be called a Hypernova, the matter at the center of the star forms a black hole and the rest of the star falls inward to make it bigger. Another shockwave is formed by the compression of matter beyond it's limits (a complicated process) dealing with the E=Mc2 limits of kinetic energy and the mass is converted to gamma rays in a powerful burst exceeded only by the big bang. The typical energy output is equivalent to all our Sun's energy being used up in about ten seconds. This is called a Gamma Ray Burst.

Gamma Ray Bursts were discovered in the sixties by the US military looking for atomic bomb explosions on the dark side of the moon (no kidding) and the data was held secret for decades.

That's the Magnetic North Pole, rather than the true North Pole. It's 11 or so degrees off from the true North Pole.

Actually, the whirlpool that is formed by a toilet is exactly like the matter falling into a black hole ... and for the same reason, i.e., gravity.

hmmmm. not quite. magnetic variation as it's called, varies depending on where you are on earth. yes, where you live, the east coast i'd guess as you used eleven degrees, variation may amount to eleven degrees. but variation changes as you travel east or west. at two lines of longitude on the globe variation is zero meaning true north and magnetic north line up exactly. the magnetic north pole is changing as well so navigation charts must be altered from time to time. the reason that compasses are not much good near the poles is that magnetic variation can be so huge as to render them useless.

here's an interesting question. let's say you are flying directly over the true north pole, that is the point where the earth's axis would protrude if it were visible. if you want to fly to new york, what heading would you take? what heading for paris? moscow? australia? maybe you'll understand why navigating over the poles requires training that involves more than simply looking at a compass.

hmmmm. not quite. if gravity was the only phenomenon affecting water falling, why would it not fall strait down on all sides? why the rotating motion of a whirlpool? anybody?

Here's a way to visualize this...

Draw a line through the earth that goes directly from one point to another on the surface. Then, for every point on that line, draw a line from the center of the earth to the surface of the earth. This creates a line on the surface of the earth that is the shortest distance between the two points on the surface. (Of course, this doesn't work if the two surface points are exactly opposite each other. In that case, any line on the surface, going from one point to the other, would be the same length.)