Black holes are one of the most mind-boggling and intricate objects that have been discovered. They can slow down time relative to the earth, cause a distortion in the fabric of space, warp light, and are completely invisible. Yet, there is still so much that astronomers haven’t learned. I decided to focus my learning around the formation, anatomy, physics, and history of black holes.
Right now with my project, I’m going back and forth between the history and scientific side of black holes. The first project I completed was about a documentary called Black Hole Apocalypse. I took several pages of notes throughout the film then composed an essay about everything I learned. My second project focused on the important historical events that relate to black holes. The project that I am currently working on is comparing two black holes from two different movies to what astronomers know of black holes now. The goal of this is to see how similar and different a realistic black hole is to a black hole in a science fiction movie. I think one of the most challenging parts of my project is the language used in the resources and the different theories that are used to explain a black hole. There is a lot of new vocabulary that is used quite often in the resources I find. It takes time to clearly understand what each word means. The second most challenging aspect of this is the theories that are used to explain the way a black hole works and is formed. Einstein's theory of relativity and special relativity are presented a lot along with many other theories. The other challenging part for me is understanding time. Grasping the concept of time in space and how it is affected by certain objects is an important part of understanding how the universe works. I have already learned so much about black holes with the couple projects I have completed. The first thing I wanted to know was, what exactly is a black hole? It is a point in space where the gravity is so strong that once something enters it can't escape, not even light. They form from massive stars collapsing in on themselves until the core gets crushed into a very small point. Once it is compressed enough it creates a black hole. These black holes can come in many different sizes ranging from 10 solar masses to 17 billion solar masses, which is the largest black hole to be found. The supermassive black holes are found at the center of every galaxy we have observed, including the milky way. With my second project, I went deeper into the history and series of events that corresponded with black holes. One of the first points in time that related to black holes was in 1783 when John Michelle had announced the idea of a “Dark Star” by using Newton's Law of Gravitation. Then later on in-time, the first-ever black hole was discovered in 1971, it was named Cygnus X-1. While astronomers were observing a binary star system they noticed an invisible companion that had enough mass and gravity to keep the other star revolving around it. This later turned out to be the first confirmed black hole. Astronomy is a threshold for a hard science class. It’s very dense in detail which makes learning it a lot more difficult yet very interesting.
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