The Edge of the Sidewalk: How technology is helping us envision what black holes look like

We’re getting ever closer to revealing a deep cosmic mystery

I’ve hinted at black holes in one of my earlier posts. These are superstructures of immense gravitational value, but they also can’t be seen (sound familiar?). We’re not sure what they do. Do they suck you up and spaghettify you? Do you get hurled into another galaxy or dimension? Are you simply lost in a vacuum of space? There seems to be a common thread interweaving the fabric of space, in that the strongest, most compelling forces are the ones that can’t be visibly seen. Thankfully we have our ever advancing technology to aid us, and help us imagine what some of these things, say a black hole, would look like.

Amazons new docuseries, Secrets of the Universe, is new amongst the material of dissecting all our cosmic wonder. I’m not familiar with it, but I imagine it goes along the lines similar to Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey hosted by Neil deGrasse Tyson. Anyway, UCLA astronomer and professor Andrea Ghez and her team have figured out a way to use telescopic images and computer modeling to create a 3D rendering of a black hole!

Now keep in mind that it is a computer simulation, so it’s an estimation of what the inside of one would look like. But Ghez and her team used Einsteins theories to create this hypothetical imaging.

Key takeaways

The video goes into a whole lot, stuff that I could ramble on about for days. But some key things that it mentions:

1. The ‘event horizon’: This is, as they say, the point of no return. Once you’re in the event horizon there’s no getting out. The opposite is said about the things outside of it though. So long as you remain outside the event horizon, you’re good (interestingly enough, if a black hole were to appear where our sun is, we would be safe, because we are far away enough from the sun where we wouldn’t be within its event horizon).
2. The idea of the black existing as not a black endless void, but rather a space that is filled with unstable, pent up energy. It’s almost as if the black hole is an alternate dimension in itself, where all this energy and light it absorbs is stowed “away” somewhere.
3. White Holes! I honestly had never heard of such a thing, and didn’t think that such a thing existed. From how it sounds, this is the “exit” of sorts of the black hole, where everything within is flung out…somewhere…?

Once again, and what a surprise, that all of these things represent what we didn’t think what black holes would be. It’s been suggested as well that matter collected in a black hole isn’t necessarily destroyed, but is rather compressed into two dimensional information. This makes black holes sound not like the whirlpools of havoc we thought, and more like passive singularities where some sort of tremendous profound event occurs.