Black Holes and the Origin of the Universe.

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CTXT 1132/2126 BLACK HOLES AND THE ORIGIN OF THE UNIVERSE

BLACK HOLES, WHITE HOLES AND PARALLEL UNIVERSES.

A SHORT OVERVIEW.

BY MICHAEL NAJDOVSKI.


INTRODUCTION:

Imagine a dark place, so dark not even light can escape; with forces so fierce they will tear apart any matter with the greatest of ease.  Imagine a place in which all the laws of physics, that combine to make our universe the place that it is, vanish into inscrutable infinities, a place where space and time are so distorted you may travel to any one of an infinite number of parallel universes, each inhabited by a slight different parallel twin of yourself.  This is the world of black holes, a phenomenon so bizarre even some of the worlds leading astrophysicists refuse to believe their existence.  Yet there are those who believe, those who try to understand the concepts, but this is a subject were text book physics have no meaning and the very complex quantum mechanics and uncertainty play a large part.

This short overview will skim through some of the basics behind this great mystery to try to give a simple explanation of the concepts behind black holes and some related topics.  (NOTE: this is a very general overview and to try to explain the whole physics side of it will require some years of studying not to mention pages upon pages of information and formulas that would look like a bunch of meaningless, jumbled characters to those without an excellent physics background.  An eyesore really.)

BLACK HOLES

Put simply, a black hole is a region of space that has so much mass concentrated in it that there is no way for a nearby object to escape its gravitational pull, not even light.  To explain this more simply, imagine earth as it is.  It has a gravitational field that is strong enough to prevent us from drifting into space and holds the moon in orbit.  If you throw a rock up, it will come back down because there is a gravitational pull.  The escape velocity (velocity at which an object must be travelling to just escape the gravitational pull) on earth is about 11.2 km/s.  This means that you would have to throw the rock at a velocity of 11.2 km/s in order for it not to come back down, i.e. it would escape the gravitational pull and go into space.  The moon on the other hand is much smaller and if you were to throw a rock up at the same speed it would travel further up because there is less of a gravitational pull on the moon.  The escape velocity on the moon is about 2.4 km/s.  Now imagine the sun, it has a huge mass and enough of a gravitational field to keep the planets of our solar system orbiting around it without drifting away.  So the larger the object, the more gravity it has and the greater the escape velocity.  

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Black holes are the result of some stars at the end of their life, provided they are at least three times the mass of our sun.  In the centre of the massive star hydrogen is being fused under intense pressures and temperatures to form helium.  The pressure from these reactions stops the sun from collapsing under the huge forces of gravity.  When the reactions stop, there will be enormous pressure, the star will be crushed down further until the surface of the star reaches its event horizon at which point the star will become a black hole (smaller stars will ...

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