No Stupid Questions
No such thing. Ask away!
!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules (interactive)
Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.
All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.
Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.
If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.
Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.
If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here. This includes using AI responses and summaries.
Credits
Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!
The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!
view the rest of the comments
Obligatory, I’m not a scientist but I took an astronomy class in college and we talked about black holes a bit: The simple answer for why a black hole will tear everything apart is because the acceleration due to gravity will destroy it
The fastest speed you can go is the speed of light in a vacuum. That’s the upper limit (at least as we currently understand physics I think). So theres a limit to how fast you can go even in space. Black holes are really big and therefore have a really strong gravitational pull. It’s so strong that if something gets close enough, eventually the gravity will be strong enough that even if you’re going the speed of light, you won’t be moving fast enough to escape it. So you wouldn’t be in the black hole yet, but you wouldn’t be able to escape its gravity anymore. That area is what’s called the event horizon. The closer you get to the black hole, the stronger the pull of gravity becomes and the faster you accelerate towards it. Eventually it gets to the point that the part of you that’s closer to the black hole is accelerating so fast that it’ll be ripped from the rest of you that’s slightly further away and therefore being pulled slightly slower
Because not even light can escape the event horizon, black holes don’t look like anything except… black holes or dark spots in space, which makes them hard to detect bc darkness isn’t uncommon in space. So we actually detect them by looking for the distortion of light that passes near the event horizon and by the bursts of gamma rays that are released when a black hole feeds on matter. But afaik black holes aren’t technically “fact” yet. They’re still theories because while we have good evidence for them existing, we haven’t confirmed it bc obviously we can’t see them and can’t visit them bc they’re really far away. They’re just a really well agreed upon theory. But I think there are some different theories of the specifics of how black holes work, since we don’t actually know a ton about them
As I said at the start, I’m not a scientist, this is just based off an astronomy class from college so I may well be wrong. If I am please please correct me
Depending on how you define “directly observe,” but here’s a “picture” of a black hole.
How do the gamma rays escape or are emitted from it if even light doesnt escape?
The gamma rays come from the super heated gas near the blackhole. That gas hasn't crossed the event horizon yet so thats why we can still see it
I’ll be honest, that’s one of the things I didn’t fully understand myself from the class. I tried to do a bit of reading to refresh my memory and I realized I was thinking of accretion disks, not gamma ray bursts. Black holes can emit gamma ray bursts apparently but I think they only emit it when they eat a star and the star explodes as it’s being pulled apart. So the burst we see is a part that’s still able to escape. I think
Accretion disks though are another way we can detect blacks holes. Because of their massive gravity, black holes draw in a lot of matter that orbits it until it eventually passes the event horizon and can no longer be detected. Before that though, all the matter, whether it be gasses or parts of stars or planets that have been torn apart, rubs together and heats up, emitting light that we can detect until it eventually is pulled past the event horizon
Like I said before, there’s still a lot we don’t know about black holes because they’re hard to find, let alone study. Honestly, the more I learned in that astronomy class, the more I realized just how much we don’t fully understand about the universe yet. We have so much left to learn and discover that it’s kind of exciting to think about what will be discovered next in our lifetime!