[Magdalen] Magdalen] neat comparisons

[James Oppenheimer]

It's a figure of speech.
Stars are stars (huge hot masses of bright glowing gasses) because they
have enough mass to make such source in their center that hydrogen fuses
into helium. As it does this, it gives off a lot of energy, and this is
what makes the sun hot, glowing, etc.
When stars die, they go through a number of possible endings. One thing
that is common to them all is that they die when their supply of fuel
(hydrogen) runs out. Some stars have enough mass to go to the next level,
that is, they start fusing the atoms of the wast product of that hydrogen
-- helium. This isn't so well understood, but as the helium burns up, it
fuses into higher order elements, which if memory serves are such things as
carbon and oxygen.
Well, as the helium runs out, the start can't keep generating the heat like
it has; it has no fuel. As the heat drops, the ability of the star to hold
its mass outwards also drops.
As the heat drops further, the star collapses into itself, and can do
several things very exciting such as going nova and blasting itself into
the neighboring cosmos and generating yet higher order elements.
If it is very massive, it falls in on itself and in this final state, it
gives out no more heat, and simply draws any material around it into
itself. It becomes very small, and yet its mass is that of the giant star.
If it ends in this state, it may go through eternity as a brown dwarf -- a
massive remains of a star that no longer has any great amount of light (all
of these things happen over very long periods).
If its mass is great enough, it goes to a further stage: it has so much
mass that light itself cannot escape form it.  When it gets to this stage,
the point where light cannot escape is called the event horizon, for there
is nothing known that can ever escape from the area beneath that imaginary
boundary.  Above it, some light can escape; below it, no light can get
away, because the gravity of the mass is too great.
It continues to draw material into it, but nothing, so far as we can
detect, ever escapes.

This is what we refer to as a black hole.

It isn't a hole, but it acts sort of as if it were a hole, since if you get
close to it, you get pulled in and can never get back out.

I recall there was a lot of speculation about this when I was growing up,
and now it is a sort of given that we have a huge black hole in the center
of the Milky Way Galaxy, and it's assumed one is in every galaxy.

Hope this helps.

James W. Oppenheimer
*“If you have a chance to accomplish something that will make things better
for people coming behind you, and you don’t do it, you're wasting your time
on this Earth.”  -- *Roberto Clemente

On Tue, Oct 14, 2014 at 11:39 AM, Grace Cangialosi <gracecan at gmail.com>
wrote:

> What I don't understand is how black holes can be anything!! I thought
> holes were nothing.....
>
> On October 14, 2014, at 4:25AM, Roger Stokes wrote:
>
> On 13/10/2014 18:36, Cantor03--- via Magdalen wrote:
> > It's getting harder with such space discoveries to fit any  terrestrial
> > religion
> > into all this, not excluding Judeo-Christianity.   At least it is  for
> me.
>
> Isn't this looking at the issue from the wrong direction?  I have no
> problem conceptualizing the possibility of a number of parallel
> universes but the God I put my trust in is the source of this and any
> other possible universes.  This means that, by definition, God is
> outside of them all - and of the black holes.  As such we should not be
> trying to fit our faith into the new discoveries but seeking to see how
> they inform and enrich our understanding of God and the relationship
> between the divine and humanity.
>
> As for the black holes themselves from what little I have read it would
> be theoretically possible to pass through one that is spinning but not
> one that is not and simply absorbs all that comes its way, hence
> increasing its gravitational attraction exponentially. Currently the
> universe is expanding and that furthest away from us is moving away
> fastest.
>
> This leads to speculation as to what will happen in the future. Will it
> continue to expand or might we get the Big Crash with everything
> collapsing back into an infinitessimally small space? Scientists
> theorize that the universe as we know it originated from just such a
> singularity so we would all be back where we began after all the stars
> have burnt out.  Might it all then start again?
>
> Roger
>