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Black holes are collapsed stars. We don't know much about them because the closest real black-hole is thousands of light years away. The gravity of black holes is so great that even light cannot escape once it is inside the event horizon. An object's event horizon is the point at which nothing, not even light, can escape. Black hole's source of gravity is an infinitely dense one-dimensional point, called a singularity. An object going into a black hole would be stretched out like spaghetti. If you could look back from the event horizon, you would see the future history of the universe flash before your eyes. Once you reach the singularity, you would be torn apart into oblivion atom by atom. The idea of black holes has been around for centuries, thought of at first in 1783 by Rev. John Mitchell, when he used Newton's theory of gravity to predict the possibility of "dark" stars. It continued in 1915 when Einstein, in his Theory of Relativity, predicted what he called "Schwartzchild singularities." They were renamed in 1967 when it was changed to black holes. Most theories of time travel revolve one way or another on black holes. The first theory of time travel involves wormholes. A wormhole is two or more connected black holes. The problem is connecting the black holes and surviving the passage. Because normally, as I said before, everything breaks down at the singularity. The second theory involves taking a very dense object and rolling it out to infinity. Then you spin it up to about a trillion R.P.M. If you fly a carefully calculated spiral around it, you would end up millions of years ahead of where you were before. The problem here is obvious. The third theory involves "cosmic strings", two dimensional singularities. if you shoot one past the other fast enough, and ride in its wake you would travel time. The smallest black hole discovered is V401 Cygni. Its kind are called stellar sized black holes, because they are similar in size to a star. Stellar black holes often are close enough to real stars that they suck hydrogen from their neighbor. The largest probable black hole would be at the center of galaxy M87. If the Earth were a black hole, its event horizon would be about a third of an inch. There is a theory that there are billions of mini black holes scattered throughout the universe. Their event horizon would be about the size of an atomic nucleus. Theoretically you could get energy from black holes for thousands of years. To do this, you would need super tensile solids,and an amount of fuel. You would need to encircle the hole with a structure made of super tensile solids. If you launch a bit of fuel followed by another bit of fuel, and if you ignite the second bit once it is quite far then the first bit would get an energy "kick" like when you jump off a running carousel. If you could collect these energy "kicks," you would have a very useful source of power. |
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