You are the commander on the first mission to visit a black hole. Specifically, you are visiting A0620-00, the closest known black hole to Earth. This stellar black hole is in an intricate dance with a small, orange-red colored star, and you and your team are in charge of studying it from up close. However, you and your team are beginning to realize the dangers of your task. While you are still thousands of miles away from the edge of the black hole, you can feel your feet growing heavy and your head grow light. If you continue closer to the black hole, you and your team will be spaghettified, but such is the nature of discovery and black holes. You command the pilot to start the descent towards the black hole.
This is a brief introduction to some of the more curious results of physics. Hopefully, by the end of this article, you will have a general grasp on spacetime, the star life cycle, neutron stars, and black holes.
Spacetime
According to Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity, first published in 1920 (2), space and time together constitute the fourth dimension. Gravity is not a force, as Newton described it, but the warping of spacetime. All matter has gravity. Super massive objects create larger “dents” in spacetime than objects with smaller masses.
Light is subject to gravity. In an interview on the podcast Ologies by Alie Ward on December 13, 2017 (5), Katie Mack an astrophysicist/cosmologist states “... gravitational waves are ripples in the fabric of spacetime.” Scientists first detected gravitational waves with LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory) in 2016. Gravitational waves are a key prediction of Einstein’s theory and their detection serves to prove the theory’s accuracy. Gravity is the key factor that determines when and how a star dies.
Star Life Cycle
According to the National Aeronautical and Space Administration in 2003, “Stars are formed in giant clouds of dust and gas, and progress through their normal life as balls of gas heated by thermonuclear reactions in their cores. Depending on their mass, they reach the end of their evolution as a white dwarf, neutron star or black hole.” Stars have lives, much like us. However, their deaths are far more spectacular. While most stars will die as white dwarf stars, bigger, more interesting stars die as neutron stars or black holes.
Neutron Stars
In Black Holes and Time Warps: Einstein’s Outrageous Legacy, published in 1995 (4), Kip Thorne writes that a neutron star is the super dense core of a dead star that is entirely composed of neutrons. A spinning neutron star is called a pulsar. All neutron stars are created when a star many times larger than our sun runs out of fuel. The gravity of its core causes the star to collapse in on itself. Eventually the pressure of the atoms in the core is overwhelmed and electrons and protons combine with other elementary particles and only the neutrons remain. Most of the time, the birth of a neutron star is marked by a burst of gamma rays, a type of light that is not visible to the human eye.
However, when the star is above a specific mass at the time of its implosion, it is too large to produce a neutron star and therefore must produce a black hole.
Black Holes
According to the 2015 NOVA documentary, Black Holes: Mysteries of the Universe (3), Black holes are “objects that are so dense that not even light can escape their gravity”. Black holes warp space so much that they’re nearly always found at the center of large galaxies and are believed to be the reason galaxies are formed. They also warp light. Black holes are often described as invisible because light cannot escape them once it passes the event horizon, or the “surface” of the black hole.
The most confusing part about black holes is that they warp time. If you were to look at a black hole as the star is imploding from another star nearby, you would see its implosion stop at a certain point. However, if you were on a rocket ship on the surface of the black hole, you would see that the black hole is still imploding, getting smaller and smaller, faster and faster.
Also, if you were on a rocket ship on the surface of the black hole, you likely wouldn't know it. Due to the extreme nature of gravity surrounding a black hole and the intense radiation, you would be very much not alive by the time you reached the surface. Spaghettification is the actual scientific term describing the event in which an object experiences a greater gravitational pull on their feet than their head to such a degree that the gravity pulls it into a spaghetti-like noodle.
Why we (as writers) care
We don't, or rather, we don't need to. However, there is something so spectacularly fictitious about the natural state of our universe and we as a civilization have grown to love science fiction. I, for one, am a bit exhausted of what I call "lazy sci-fi". You know what I'm talking about: the rogue main characters steal some sort of spacecraft whose shape would likely not be very possible in the vacuum of space and set out to travel at light speed or near light speed across galaxies to save whoever is supposed to be in charge of the whole universe. Don't get me wrong, I could watch the original trilogy of Star Wars on repeat, but there's something boring about reusing the same plot over and over again (hint: we've gotten a romance revival, now it's time for a sci-fi spring cleaning).
Writers of sci-fi often don't choose to work with some of the more extreme outcomes of Einstein's Theory (e.i. black holes), and that is just a flat out shame. What more could one hope for regarding inspiration than a massive orb of nothingness that we know almost nothing about? It is the perfect place for sci-fi to reroot itself, in the heart of the new frontier, just as it shifted from our oceans, to the moon, to mars, and beyond into other galaxies.
Need some help writing your next sci-fi hit? Consider the wacky and wonderful nature of black holes and their younger, less threatening siblings- neutron stars. We don't know much about them as we are, so why not make something up?
Leave a reaction down below and tell us your thoughts about black holes, neutron stars, and any other cool space stuff you've used or wanted to use in a story!
Leave a reaction down below and tell us your thoughts about black holes, neutron stars, and any other cool space stuff you've used or wanted to use in a story!
Works Cited
Dunbar, Brian. “Stellar Evolution - The Birth, Life, and Death of a Star.” NASA, NASA, 4 Sep. 2003, www.nasa.gov/audience/forstudents/9-12/features/stellar_evol_feat_912.html.
Einstein, Albert, and Robert W. Lawson. Relativity: the Special and General Theory. Ancient Wisdom Publications, 2012.
Muira, Kairo. “Black Holes: Mysteries Of The Universe - New NOVA Space Documentary HD.” YouTube, YouTube, 29 June 2015, www.youtube.com/watch?v=hbQY58QX9Rs&t=33s.
Thorne, Kip S. Black Holes and Time Warps: Einstein's Outrageous Legacy. W.W. Norton, 1995.
Ward, Alie. “Cosmology with Katie Mack: Two Parter.” Alie Ward, Alie Ward, 13 Dec. 2017, www.alieward.com/ologies/cosmology.
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