Wandering about black holes.

First an update on the tires.  The tire place made record time getting the six large 22.5 inch tires replaced with new ones.  I made it there just before another RV pulled up.  Most of the bays were full of 18 wheelers so he had to wait behind me to get in.  We struck up a conversation and he said that he had retired and his wife was going to retire this coming week.  They had sold their house and had been living in the RV for almost a year now.  Already being full timers and after his wife retires in a few days, they have nothing to hold them any where and plan to hit the road and enjoy their retirements.  There you go folks, another full time RVing couple joining your ranks.

I got wondering about black holes and I keep coming up with questions.  Do you know that as early as the late 18^th century a couple of scientists separately figured that a star could be so massive that not even light could escape?  A couple of hundred years later, Einstein’s theories showed this to be possible.  How do you study something you can not see?  Well, by the way things around it are acting.  In a binary system where two stars are locked together, one can be a neutron star or a black hole.  Both are strange creatures, but how the heck can you tell a large neutron star from a small stellar mass black hole?  Well, when the unknown object feeds off its partner, the gasses heat up and put off X-rays and when the material hits the surface of a neutron star, there is an X-ray burst.  If it were a black hole, there would be no burst since the gas would enter the event horizon after which nothing would escape.  Another way is to calculate the mass of the unseen object by the way it affects its partner star.

These small stellar mass black holes are tiny babies compared to the monsters that live at the center of galaxies.  They can be millions to billions of solar masses in size.  They are detected by X-rays, gamma ray bursts, etc. but the easy way is to observe the action of any stars in close proximity to the suspected object.  I am not going any deeper into black holes because up until recently, it was hard to prove their existence.  I, however, question their name.  Yes, they are black, but I don’t think of them as holes.  They have to be the densest object imaginable, so how could they be called “holes”.  Granted, no one knows what lurks behind the event horizon or what really goes on in there.  I, for one, don’t think the answer will ever be discovered, at least not by us humans.

Now I don’t want your day to be black, so you all have a good, bright day now, you hear?