11/25: Black Holes

Since the release of the new movie, Interstellar, there has been a lot of buzz in the science world about black holes. For the most part, this buzz has resulted in astronomers (especially my UC friends who study astronomy) trying to prove or disprove the theories of the movie. But before we jump into the complicated stuff, we have to have a basic understanding of black holes.


Let's start with NASA's page, "What Is a Black Hole?" This page was designed for grades K-4, but I found it highly informative, as I know nothing about black holes (I guess I shouldn't play in Jeff Foxworthy's famous game show, Are You Smarter than a Fifth Grader?)

Basically me.

So, what exactly is a black hole? According to NASA, "A black hole is a place in space where gravity pulls so much that even light can not get out. The gravity is so strong because matter has been squeezed into a tiny space. This can happen when a star is dying" (NASA). This is where the term "black hole" comes from - it is literally a hole in space that has such a high gravitational pull, that it is as dark as anything can possibly be. For this reason, we may not be able to see black holes. It takes a certain kind of scientific telescope to be able to find them (NASA). The reason they are visible is because when a black  hole forms, the gravitational pull affects the movement, or orbit, of the stars around it. When a black hole and a star are close together, it creates a special form of high-energy light that can only be seen by the scientific telescopes (NASA).

So, if you're a worry wart like myself, you're probably saying, "Wow, black holes sound really dangerous. Are we going to be eaten by a black hole?!"

According to NASA, it's impossible for Earth to be eaten by a black hole. "Black holes do not go around in space eating stars, moons and planets. Earth will not fall into a black hole because no black hole is close enough to the solar system for Earth to do that" (NASA). Basically, black holes don't have time for us; we aren't delicious enough. Also, although the sun seems really big to us, it is too small of a star to ever turn into a black hole (NASA).

The Earth is safe. Everyone take a deep breath.

So, that leaves the all-important question: "Could Interstellar actually happen?"

*CAUTION: SPOILER ALERTS*

For those of us who have never seen the movie, here is my own synopsis: Matthew McConaughey, a farmer who was once a pilot, needs to save the Earth because everything is now dirt and fire and no one can live. His daughter tries to convince him not to go, but eventually, he goes to space with Anne Hathaway to try to find a place for the people of Earth to move to. They find a black hole in the rings of Saturn and try to use its gravitational pull to travel to other planets across the space-time continuum. However, when they get to their first planet, Anne Hathaway screws everyone over and they spend too much time on a planet where one hour is equivalent to seven years on Earth. Matthew McConaughey tries to travel to a planet with Matt Damon, but Damon is bitter about his life and tries to kill him. After McConaughey defeats Damon, McConaughey travels back to the black hole, travels across the space-time continuum into another plane, and communicates with his daughter using dust. After a series of things that I didn't understand, his daughter uses science to find the coordinates of the location that her father wants her to go with her Earthling friends. She builds a new planet that looks like a giant straw, and everyone lives happily ever after.

Obligatory Dazed and Confused reference.

So is it really possible to travel across time and space in a black hole that's housed in the rings of Saturn? According to NASA, scientists believe that " the smallest black holes are as small as just one atom" (NASA). However, a normal-sized black hole, known as a "stellar," can be "up to 20 times more than the mass of the sun" (NASA). So, a black hole that is large enough to travel through might not exist on the rings of Saturn. However, there is a black hole that exists in the Milky Way galaxy, known as Sagittarius A+. 

So what about the science of the whole "space-time travel" thing? Well, according to Kip Thorne, the physicist in charge of the science behind Interstellar, time-travel through wormholes is theoretically possible. He discusses it further in his novels, The Science of Interstellar (2014) and Black Holes and Time Warps: Einstein's Outrageous Legacy (1994). He intends on writing about black holes further in a new edition of his novel, which will include time travel (otherwise known as the space-time storm), a fifth dimension in the universe, and how someone might theoretically die in a black hole (NASA). There's a lot of science-y words that I don't understand, like "quantum" and "Chandrasekhar limit" and "density." However, from what I got out of these articles, there's totally a possibility that time travel and jumping across spatial planes could one day become a reality.

Works Cited

Cofield, Calla.  "What's New in Black Holes? 'Interstellar' Physicist Kip Thorne Tells All."  December 19, 2014.  Retrieved from: http://www.space.com/27970-whats-new-black-holes-kip-thorne.html

NASA.  nasa.gov.

     ---. "Black Holes."  Retrieved from http://science.nasa.gov/astrophysics/focus-areas/black-holes/

     ---. "NASA's Chandra Detects Record-Breaking Outburst from Milky Way's Black Hole."  Retrieved from: https://www.nasa.gov/press/2015/january/nasa-s-chandra-detects-record-breaking-outburst-from-milky-way-s-black-hole

     ---. "What Is a Black Hole?"  Retrieved from: http://www.nasa.gov/audience/forstudents/k-4/stories/nasa-knows/what-is-a-black-hole-k4.html