DIVINE WORD COLLEGE OF BANGUED

Bangued, Abra
School of Arts, Sciences and Education
Bachelor of Elementary Education/Bachelor of Secondary Education

Palangi, Genesis B.
BSED 2
Answer the following questions.
1. What are black holes made of?

 Black holes are places where extreme gravitational attraction draws everything, even light, to a
single point in space.  The problem with understanding exactly what happens to the stuff that
pulled into a black hole is that physicists really don’t have a complete understanding of how
gravity works under the extreme conditions found in a black hole.  Called “quantum gravity”, an
understanding of how gravity works in a black hole requires physicists to figure out what
happens to gravity at atomic-scale levels.  The physical properties of a black hole, which as
you have said are mass, charge, and angular momentum, are measurable and are properties
that derive from the event horizon of the black hole.  Inside the event horizon, which is where
quantum gravity effects start to come into play, are poorly understood.  In the end, your
suggestion that matter is not “destroyed” when it enters a black hole but just becomes
unobservable to us, is plausible.  Physicists cannot be definitive on this issue, though, as we
just don’t have a good understanding of how gravity works at the center of a black hole.

2. Why is the universe flat and not spherical?

 All other cosmological data suggests the universe is flat, meaning it has no curvature, similar to
a sheet of paper. These Planck measurements indicate that it could be “closed”, or spherical,
which would mean that if you travelled far enough in one direction, you would end up back
where you started. That is because the extra lensing implies the presence of extra dark matter,
which would pull the universe into a finite sphere instead of a flat sheet.

3. If the light has no mass, then what draws it into a black hole?

 Photons (which are the "particles" that make up light) have zero rest mass. To understand why
photons "fall" into a black hole, you need to know a bit of general relativity. What general
relativity says is that any massive object warps the spacetime around it. You can think of this
with a simple analogy. Imagine a stretched rubber sheet that is completely flat. This represents
the spacetime when there is no mass. Now, if you put a heavy ball in the rubber sheet, it will
cause a distortion in the sheet. This is exactly what happens in space, except that it is in 3
dimensions instead of two.
 Further, a photon always travels by the shortest distance between two points. As spacetime is
warped, the light appears to bend around a massive object. In reality, it is not that the object is
attracting light, but it is just that the photons are traveling by the shortest distance in a curved
spacetime.
 Around a black hole, the distortion of spacetime is extreme. At the event horizon of a black
hole, the spacetime curves into itself and as a result, light cannot escape from a black hole.