Tuned into Technology: Eating a White Dwarf Star and Falling into a Black Hole
Nov 13th, 2009 | By WebEditor | Category: Blogs, Tuned into Technology
Welcome back to Tuned into Technology. Although my last few blog entries have been about different forms of technology, it seems necessary to change it up a bit. It is never good to be stuck in a rut and I am doing my best to tell you about different things that are happening in the world of technology and even some stuff about space.
During my weekly cruise through science magazines and websites, I am once again looking at an article on the Popular Science website. For this entry, I will be talking about ridiculous “what if” questions regarding the final frontier.
On what seems to have been a relatively un-scientific day for the writers, Bjorn Carey wrote an article on what would happen if you were randomly able to scoop up a piece of a white dwarf star with a spoon and pop it into your mouth for a good chewing. The article appears on the website.
Mark Hammergren, an astronomer from Chicago’s Adler Planetarium said “everything about it would be bad.” The first problem for our intergalactic plasma food consumer is the fact that the closest star is nearly 9 light-years away. First, if we were able to create a hyper space drive and fly off to the closest white dwarf star, the gravity around the dense stars is 100,000 times greater than that of our home planet, the Earth. If your space exploration team were to fall onto the star, they would become a plasma goo almost instantaneously.
Hammergren said,” The high pressure would cause the hydrogen atoms in your body to fuse into helium.” The author states that this is the same reaction that triggers a nuclear bomb.
Then, if you were to transport this small piece of the star back to Earth without it blowing up in your face, you would be hard pressed to eat such a morsel. Hammergren said, “You’d pop it into your mouth and it would fall unimpeded through your body, carve a channel through your gut, come out through your nether regions and burrow a hole toward the centre of the Earth.”
For those people who are looking for the closest place that serves white dwarf star, it might be healthier for you to eat at fast food joints.
http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2009-10/what-would-happen-if-i-ate-teaspoonful-white-dwarf-star
The second article that I came across asked the question, “What would you see if you were to go inside a black hole?” Human beings, obviously have never been able to go inside black holes, but the article from CNN states that with the help of Einstein’s general theory of relativity, scientists can virtually see the inside of the hole itself. Although the video seen below comes from Youtube and not the CNN article, this video explains what you would see much better than the one embedded with the actual article.
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