Written October 10th, 2009, ~10pm

NOVA: The Monster of the Milky Way

Space-time is so confusing! And yet, it is also so interesting. An hour-long documentary packed with so much information. So let’s get to it because there is much that I have just learned and only a little of it stuck. I want to make sure that I remember all this hence the typing of it while it is still fresh in my mind.
Black holes are very complex “creatures.”
Dying from a black hole would be painful, to say the least.
There is a black hole in the center of our galaxy.
There are black holes in the centers of every other galaxy well.
Galaxies are cannibals. x]

I think that’s all the little topics so on to the explanations.

1. Black holes are very complex “creatures.”
Creatures=what the guy from the documentary called them. Makes sense, too, and I’ll say why. These little things may not be actual animals, but they sure can seem like it. Black holes are basically described as a very mysterious and very hungry worm-like vacuum. They eat everything that crosses their paths and they don’t seem to care how big or fast that object is. And when they get hungry, man, can they eat! Feasts are what they are called in the program and it is followed by a period of latency, probably to allow the material that was swallowed up to digest… This is exactly why we’re lucky that our black hole isn’t exactly looking for a meal at the moment.
2. Dying from a black hole would be painful, to say the least.
Many are well aware of the fact that black holes are basically giant, invisible super vacuums. However, it is not wind that is responsible for the absorption of all matter that enters, it is gravity. Apparently, if you were to venture near enough to a black hole to be sucked in, the gravity (if you were vertically positioned in relation to the black hole) would center on your feet and pull them into the hole while your head and torso would be rather slow to follow. The hole’s gravity would be focused on the thing closest to it (in this case your feet) effectively tearing you into pieces. The process would then repeat causing those 2 pieces to become 4 and those 4 into 8 and so on and so forth while being simultaneously sent spiraling into the black abyss. Of course, the documentary explained this so much more accurately and painfully that I.
3. There is a massive black hole in the center of our galaxy.
And not just a regular little black holes that you may hear of all the time. New ones. Massive ones. Millions of light-years wide. It was discovered through the use of infrared waves and telescopes to gather data on the movements of stars. The stars that were near the black hole would speed up as they got closer and reach their highest speeds as they were swung around it and slowed down as they moved away from it. Using the data from stars like these and what I’m sure were very complex mathematical equations, astronomers were able to locate and measure the black hole. Of course, with their curiosity, scientists wanted to know if this was unique to our galaxy which leads to the following.
4. There are black holes in the centers of every other galaxy as well.
The ones that we know of and can see of course. And so with the question of black hole center uniqueness (or commonness, your choice) the astronomers moved on to another quest of curiosity satisfaction. Their new question was this: How/why are these giant black holes there? They did a bit of looking into the past to answer this, all the way to the beginnings of the universe: the Big Bang (I’ll assume you know what the Big Bang is). They believed that the first stars to be born in the universe were born old, as red supergiants with a life span of only a few minutes before they became supernovas. These supernovas led to the creation of black holes which attracted all sorts of matter, from dust particles to gases and such to eventually create “infant” galaxies. This leads to the next and final topic.
5. Galaxies are cannibals.
Yup yup. Galactic cannibalism it is called. And it is pretty self explanatory except that galaxies do not have a stomach or a mouth or even teeth with which to literally eat their neighbors. It is more of a gravitational attraction which pulls two or more galaxies together, causing them to clash and either: a) allow the larger galaxies to break apart and absorb the smaller ones, or b) cause both galaxies to break apart and then merge together to create a new, larger galaxy.

All of this leads me to believe in one thing.

All life on Earth is doomed! … eventually. In another couple billion years or so. Because our nearest galactical neighbor is the Andromeda galaxy and is actually heading in our direction. It seems inevitable that these two giants will clash and merge causing everything in them to be scattered in all directions while the merging takes place. And if not that, there’s always our center. That black hole is pretty big and we all know now what will happen if it expands to the point that our planet is in it’s range. (But what a way to go, right? Being torn apart by something we can’t even see, let alone begin to understand?)

Anyways, it’s all very confusing stuff. And what I have typed up here is probably only half of everything that was mentioned in the documentary (because that’s all I really understood or can remember )

Oh and one final thing. I may not be correct on some of things mentioned here because I am typing this all from memory after watching it once and being slightly distracted by conversations going on in the sala and the hallway in front of my room. If you want to know more or have more accurate info or even if you just want to see some pretty neat special effects/animations try looking for this documentary on PBS or by typing “Monster of the Milky Way” into Google or something. I’d provide a link but my internet’s been cut off as it’s now 11:45 pm (took long to type because not only was this hard to put into words, I’m not even supposed to be awake right now, ha!)


Okay! Now I am done. …Damn this long…

P.S. Sala = living room (Spanish)