Recent content by PacketMan

The solar system extends all the way through the Ort Cloud, about half the distance to the next nearest star. They didn't know THAT.

My layman's understanding is that when a black hole has an abundance of matter to "feed on", as in it has a large accretion disk around it and lots of matter falling in, that matter gets moving super fast (near the speed of light) and gets super heated, thus shining very brightly. That is what...

Ah, that makes sense, I think. So, to the outside observer, the gravitational red shift would take the light coming from the falling subject all the way to black when we see time stop for them and they are "frozen" at the event horizon?

M-theory posits that rippling membranes floating in 11 dimensional space existed before the big bang, and that big bangs possibly arise from them bumping into each other. So M-theory is a marriage of Big Bang theory and "outside space before BB".

I'm just a layman, but the same thought has crossed my mind. If everything that falls into a black hole seems to freeze at the event horizon to outside observers, then how can it still be black? Wouldn't we, as outside observers, be seeing all the stuff that has fallen in over the lifetime of...

The other question is how much of a sample have we really been able to take so far? We've been looking for what, 50 years? I saw an astrophysicist on some program on the Science Channel put it very well: If you dipped a glass of water in the ocean and looked it at, would you conclude that the...