Tuesday, November 3, 2009

Backtracking 5 Black holes

Recently, as in the last 20 years or so, people have been taking a good look at black holes (pun intended…ya get it…cause you can’t see them…cause they’re black…anyway). We look at them by observing the motion of the things around them. Then we can find where they are and how big they are. And we’ve found some big ones. There are 4 general classes of black holes, tiny ones like the one the Large Hardon Collider is suppose to make, small ones created when stars violently blow up (the ones in sci-fi movies), big ones that theorists have predicted are them, but we don’t know that much about them, and super massive, the monsters that we have observed at the center of every galaxy we’ve looked for them in. I once saw this wonderful documentary on super massive black holes but I couldn’t really find it so here’s one that seems to be just as good. These giant objects sleep, literately, at the center of most galaxies, including our own and are thought to play a major role in galaxy formation.

No comments:

Post a Comment