The average American doesn’t win a Nobel Prize, either.
Singularities are the beating hearts of black holes. Well, okay, I’m being literary. They’re at the heart of black holes. They are the black hole.
A black hole is sort of like a car that’s gone through a crusher, except it has more material in it, and takes up less space.
I don’t know how much a black hole weighs, or whether it weighs anything, but I can’t lift one.
The singularity contains everything in the black hole. This could be a bunch of stars, or even a bunch of galaxies. There’s not much room for all of it. In fact, there isn’t any room for any of it, because singularities are infinitely tiny. Matter must get crushed out of existence in a black hole, but the energy and gravity are still around, so something’s there, even though there’s no “there.”
This doesn’t make much sense, so for the first two million years of human experience, people scoffed at the idea there could be such a thing. Probably it didn’t even occur to most of them. But it did occur to a few people, who began to suspect they existed, but they couldn’t prove it. Then Robert Penrose figured out in 15 seconds, while standing on a street corner waiting for a walk sign to change, how to prove it.
He went back to his office and wrote it up. It was a tough sell. It took a while for other physicists to come around. Okay, a lot of years. And 55 years later, he gets a Nobel Prize for what took him 15 seconds to think of.
I can’t do it that fast. In fact, I can’t do it at all. I’ll bet you can’t either. Most people won’t give a damn anyway — who’ll ever visit a black hole, or turn one into a tourist attraction? — but if you’re interested in reading the fascinating story about how Penrose proved black holes exist, click here.
None of this would have happened if he had jaywalked and gotten hit by a car, so wait for the damn light, in case you have a bright idea in your head that you haven’t thought of yet, too.
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Black holes are the remnants of massive stars. A star as massive as Betelgeuse. Such stars at the end of their lives nuclear fussion no longer has enough matter to keep going and gravity wins and the star collapses into either a neutron star that is a planet sized mass of neutrons, or the star continues to collapse into a singularity about the size of a period, but with all the remaining mass of the star and whatever falls into the black holes event horizon. There is no beating heart as there is no energy except that which escapes at the event horizon as something falls into the singularity adding to the mass.
Actually Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity is the basis of black holes. Einstein more or less wanted to say they don’t exist, but the math said they could.
At the moment just getting around our solar system is daunting, and getting to the closest star is barely feasible, and is a multi generational ship on a one way trip. So no tourism. In fact no tourism, as it is expensive, and like in the Alien movies only financially possible for a large corporation. Of course one does not want to come across one wondering space between here and Alpha Centari.
A singularity is infinitely smaller than a period.