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Not from the video… What blew my mind was to learn that a black hole get bigger when it absorbs light. Light from a campfire you had as a kid could be feeding
by devoutsalsa 4y ago
Not from the video… What blew my mind was to learn that a black hole get bigger when it absorbs light. Light from a campfire you had as a kid could be feeding a black hole right now.
- beeforpork 4y agoWell, yeah, it is weird at first. But once you think about it, it is not unintuitive: if the light was just gone, that would be wrong, too, right? Also, energy == mass, so of course, it is equivalent to throw mass into a black hole or energy. The longer I think about it, the more it is mass that is the weird thing. What is mass? Something like frozen energy...
- abhaynayar 4y ago> Light from a campfire you had as a kid could be feeding a black hole right now. I don't think we have a close enough black hole for this to be true for anyone reading this right now.
- sliken 4y agoMaybe, there's a theory that the 9th planet is a black hole, and that's why it's very hard to detect outside of the gravitational effects. Amusingly there's a diagram in the paper that's a 1:1 diagram (life size) in the paper. Would be crazy if true, we could verify all kinds of things by tinkering with a live black hole.
- samatman 4y agoThe Earth gets bigger as well, and by the same mass per photon, when it absorbs light. It loses this mass through radiation, but then, so does a black hole. That's fancy Proper Noun Hawking Radiation, but radiation it remains. Not trying to be a downer, I find the fact that a photon doesn't /have/ mass but still /is/ mass endlessly fascinating.