On the Subject of....Black Holes
We have been hearing rather a lot about ‘Black Holes’ over the last 3 months or so….some would argue a bit too much. Sadly, there has been little attempt being made to explain their origin or properties, and the focus instead has been on explaining how terrible things are likely to get for us all because of them. In an attempt to dispel some of the current UK.Gov-induced pre-budget gloom and despondency, I’ll take a light-hearted look at these not-so-celestial phenomena and attempt to explain them for the interested reader. Firstly, do they resemble the cosmological feature of the same name ? In some ways, they would certainly appear to.... Black holes frequently arise at the centres of galaxies and have such huge masses that their gravitational attraction sucks in everything in their vicinity, including light. They thus have a habit of getting progressively bigger…and darker, and present a distinct ‘event horizon’ beyond which nothing is visible. Our friendly neighbourhoo