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Asked by anon-191713 to Adam, Kathryn, Graeme, Chris, Anne, Agnes on 9 Nov 2018. This question was also asked by anon-191140, anon-190973.
Question: HAVE YOU EVER SEEN A REAL BLACK HOLE
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Adam McGuinness answered on 9 Nov 2018:
Hi Garry,
No I haven’t, I don’t know if you know this, but we see things when light bounces off them and enters our eyes, black holes actually have so much gravity that light can’t escape them, so no light can enter our eyes, so they seem invisible! So even if we knew where a black hole was, if we looked at it we wouldn’t see anything but the absence of light, or pure blackness, so no-one can actually ‘see’ a black hole, we can just it’s effects.
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Anne Green answered on 9 Nov 2018: last edited 10 Nov 2018 5:01 pm
As Adam says, we can’t we can’t see black holes directly with our eyes as nothing, not even light, can escape from a black hole. However we can work out that they’re there by looking at their effects on the things we can see. For instance we know there’s a heavy black hole at the middle of our Milky Way galaxy which weighs the same as millions of Suns. We’ve worked this out by looking at the orbits of stars in the middle of the Milky Way (they orbit the black hole just like the Earth orbits the Sun). There’s one particular star, called S2, which gets really close to the centre and moves really fast (there’s an animation of this here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u_gggKHvfGw). This tells us that at the centre there’s a very heavy invisble object in a very small space. And we don’t know of anything other than a black hole that can be that small and heavy.
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Agnes Wojtusiak answered on 11 Nov 2018:
Technically it’s impossible, so no… Also, because I wouldn’t even know where to look for one!
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Graeme Poole answered on 13 Nov 2018:
We can’t actually see black holes because no light escapes them. We can see the effects of them though – there is supermassive black hole at the centre of our Milky Way galaxy. Without it, the galaxy would fall apart!!
Comments
Anne commented on :
As Adam says, we can’t ‘see’ black holes with our eyes however we can work out that they’re there from their effects on things we can see. For instance we’ve worked out that there’s a massive black hole at the centre of our Milky Way galaxy by watching stars orbiting around it. They get really close and move very fast, which tells us that there’s something which weighs a huge amount squeezed into a tiny space. And it can only be a big black hole.
anon-191167 commented on :
No I haven’t
anon-191145 commented on :
IF I WERE TO BE SUCKED INTO A BLACK HOLE WHAT WOULD HAPPEN
Anne commented on :
@Goldgamer150 you’d get spaghettified! Say you were going in feet first. The force of gravity close to a black hole is really strong. And the force on your feet would be much bigger than the force on your head. So you’d get stretched out, like a piece of spaghetti (and then ripped to pieces…).
Agnes commented on :
@Goldgamer150 You would be crushed by gravity so much that all the cells and molecules and atoms in your body would stop being themselves and just become a part of a giant mush of STUFF.