posted on Jan, 18 2009 @ 02:47 PM
let me see if i can help a bit.
think of the universe as a big black elastic sheet stretched out in all directions, and you are some god like entity (who you are does not matter in
this experiment, bear with me) now you in all your godliness or whatever have a hand full of marbles. some big some small. some heavy some light. now,
when you place these marble objects on the sheet... err i mean universe
it causes indentions. this is what mass bodies do to "space time" or the
"fabric of space". the denser or heavier the object the further it sinks into the fabric.
now take some other marble like objects and roll them accross your sheet and see what happens... they wont roll straight across your sheet because the
indentions of the still marbles cause the rolling marbles to kareem towards them. if the rolling marble is moving fast enough then it will have a
slight chantge in course at it moves past the object then it will travel on in a straight line until it encounters the bend of another still marble.
if the bend of the still marble is too steep it will "catch" the rolling marble and they will occupy the same space on the sheet and the dent will
be larger...
with me?
now imagine that light or photons are like super super fast ferrari marbles. they are top of the line and cannot be caught by these mundane standing
marbles because they move too fast. that is where your black hole comes in. it is like you grabbing a point on the bottom of the sheet and dragging it
down to create a very very deep dent that even the ferrari marbles cant out run.
thats the basics... with me? hope so...
ok now, the debate used to be that all mass that got "trapped" or "sucked" into a black hole would never be able to leave because once you came
within a certain distance you would have to be travelling at speeds faster than the speed of light to escape the gravity of a black hole and the
singularity (or very very dense marble at the center) would break down all matter into basic elementary particles that we may not even understand and
compact them in this un-retreivable ball. more recently there has been a mathematical discovery or rather a theory that has been supported, not
proven, but supported mathematically is that information (original bits of stuff... dont get lost) can exit the black hole through a process in the
form of radiation called hawking radiation after the "discoverer/inventor" Dr. Stephen Hawking.
with this it is possible to have varying sizes of black holes and they can have life spans that depend on the amount of available mass incoming vs the
amount of outgoin hawking radiation. they become much less like mystical dragons that may or maynot exist and either way are rare, and are now looked
at more like common cockroaches. big small and everywhere, and even radiation has a hard time killing em...
do we have a black hole in the center of the earth? hard to say. it would not be impossible for sure. and a small black hole may take eons to grow
large enough to become noticably measurable...
keep on thinking free, hope this helped....
-A