Cheap Astronomy Ep. 121: Black Holes Yet Again!

Very dense and podcastable.


Cheap Astronomy finds there can never be too many podcasts about
black holes.


 


Dear Cheap Astronomy – What are squeezars?


Squeezars are stars that orbit supermassive black holes.
Essentially they are stars on a slow


death spiral into the black hole and the squeezing referred to is
the tidal stretch being exerted


upon them as the orbit closer and closer to the black hole’s
event horizon. That tidal stretching


heats them up, a bit like how the moon of Io, orbiting close to
Jupiter is the most volcanically


active body in the Solar System. So they are unusually hot and
they are also unusually fast.


 


Dear Cheap Astronomy – Do black holes float in water?


Well, the internet says they do so it must be true. But let’s
unpack this a bit. The internet also


says that if you compress the Earth down to marble size it will
become a black hole. This is true


in a hypothetical sense, but actually compressing the Earth down
to marble size is pretty much


impossible. You could use some kind of gargantuan press to start
the process, but once the


Earth becomes denser than the material the press surfaces are
made of, the press becomes


useless. 


 


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