Down the Rabbit Hole

So Black Holes aren’t really a situation society has been prepared for. While Cape Cod has the most inefficient evacuation route (2 two-lane bridges flanked by traffic circles from hell) at least we’ve been briefed on said-evacuation-plan. I’ve seen the Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson’s masterpiece, San Andres, and while it looks difficult to cushion yourself from that mayhem, at least the state is spoon-feeding you the obtuse “stand in the frame of a door” rhetoric.  In my years of wanting to be a tornado chaser, I never understood why after “go to the basement”, the next best spot was “sit in the bathtub”. I have friends who grew up near a nuclear power plant and their drill in case of a nuclear meltdown was to sit under their desk and cover their head. Yes, the aura of pencil shavings and ABC gum drying above you will protect your genetic material from irreversible devastation. Even though 90% of these techniques are impractical and we all know that the masses will forget everything learned and dissolve into complete anarchy, just having that security blanket of obliviousness makes it easier to sleep at night. Then there are the situations so grave that we’re not even pathetically prepared for them, as it’s actually counterproductive to bring these eminent situations to light and into the minds of the populous. Examples:

Regarding black holes, our parents, our government, the world knows that we have zero hope of surviving. But putting the grim reality of absolute savagery aside, black holes are actually quite fascinating. Most galaxies in the universe have some supermassive and quite hangry black hole silently lurking in the center, ready to devour and obliterate anything that comes within its sweeping radius. What’s comforting is that scientists really don’t know where these bad boys are, how they got there and exactly how they became so behemoth.  The term “black hole” is quite misleading because with “hole” you expect something at the end, be it a stopping point or a portal to some majestic other world where golden retrievers run rampant and cheese is calorie free. Just so we’re clear on this, in a black hole you don’t go anywhere; you just get added to the darkness. This is similar to thinking what magical place you go if you jump into a trash compactor. Your body would go through “Spaghettification” – which is an actual, nightmarish thing.

 Apparently when a black hole eats an star (or Earth-like planet), it basically takes the object that has a quantifiable mass and compresses it so tightly that nothing can escape and the object is reduced to a gravitational singularity. They’re deemed “black” because even light can’t escape the insane gravitational grasp. I can’t even fit all running t-shirts into my t-shirt drawer and you’re telling me that this entire mess of a planet is boiled down to a solitary unit. Bill Nye, please education the children of tomorrow about how this occurs because I hope to God future generations know how to pack a suitcase more efficiently than I do. A Tidal Disruption Event, or TDE, is when a star/planet/earth strays too close to a black hole and gets totally torn apart and sucked down like a jar of almond butter in my fridge. It was previously thought that black holes primarily consume gas and dust, but recent studies have shown that a quarter of the bulk of black holes comes from swallowing stars and planets, which in turn prompts their voracious growth.

To answer the one question I know you probably have too: where is the closest black hole to earth? Super-massive black holes lie at the heart of every galaxy but additionally there are stellar black holes, which form when massive stars die in a supernova. The premiere super-massive black hole in the middle of the Milky Way is located about 27,000 light-years away from Earth, and that of the Andromeda Galaxy is a far reach of 2.5 million light years away.

I hope you’re all one step closer to my constant level of curiosity-induced anxiety.

And back to more useful/business related topics.