Star Eater

         

          This article was extremely interesting.  I have always found space to be fascinating.  The author did a brilliant job at keeping the article interesting, fun, and engaging.  The author did this by using many numbers and comparisons that would help the reader understand better what he was trying to explain.  One example of this is when the author says, “A sugar-cube-size fragment of a neutron star would weigh a billion tons on Earth; a neutron star’s gravitational pull is so severe that if you were to drop a marshmallow on it, the impact would generate as much energy as an atom bomb.”  The author in this example is trying to explain how severe a star’s gravitational pull is by using a marshmallow as an example, which is awesome.

          The author uses Huxley’s three directions.  The first direction is moving toward the personal and inner experience.  The author does this by explaining what would happen to you if you were to cross the event horizon.  The author states, “Black holes, with their incredible gravitational pull, are basically time machines. Get on a rocket, travel to Sgr A*. Ease extremely close to the event horizon, but don’t cross it. For every minute you spend there, a thousand years will pass on Earth. It’s hard to believe, but that’s what happens. Gravity trumps time.”

          The second direction is moving toward the objective, the concrete, and the factual.  This entire article is factual.  I learned a copious amount of new information every sentence that I read.  I did not know any of this material prior to reading this article, so I learned a bunch of new facts and information on black holes after reading it.  The author also talks about Albert Einstein and provides facts about what he thought.  For example, the author says, “Albert Einstein, one of the most imaginative thinkers in the history of physics, never believed black holes were real. His formulas allowed for their existence, but nature, he felt, would not permit such objects. Most unnatural to him was the idea that gravity could overwhelm the supposedly mightier forces—electromagnetic, nuclear—and essentially cause the core of an enormous star to vanish from the universe, a cosmic-scale David Copperfield act.”

The third direction moves toward the abstract and the universal.  Besides the article itself talking about the universe that we currently live in and the many others that exist, the author also talks about how the universe got created.  The author concludes by saying, “Our universe began, 13.8 billion years ago, in a tremendous big bang.”  The author concludes by stating that the evidence for what could reside in a black hole is intriguing and ends with an interesting thought… “A black hole might have originated in another universe.  But we may be living in it”