What Are "Black Holes?"

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New videos DAILY: https://bigth.ink Join Big Think Edge for exclusive video lessons from top thinkers and doers: https://bigth.ink/Edge ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------- There's more than one way to make a black hole, says NASA's Michelle Thaller. They're not always formed from dead stars. For example, there are teeny tiny black holes all around us, the result of high-energy cosmic rays slamming into our atmosphere with enough force to cram matter together so densely that no light can escape.CERN is trying to create artificial black holes right now, but don't worry, it's not dangerous. Scientists there are attempting to smash two particles together with such intensity that it creates a black hole that would live for just a millionth of a second.Thaller uses a brilliant analogy involving a rubber sheet, a marble, and an elephant to explain why different black holes have varying densities. Watch and learn!Bonus fact: If the Earth became a black hole, it would be crushed to the size of a ping-pong ball. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------- MICHELLE THALLER Dr. Michelle Thaller is an astronomer who studies binary stars and the life cycles of stars. She is Assistant Director of Science Communication at NASA. She went to college at Harvard University, completed a post-doctoral research fellowship at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena, Calif. then started wo

Published 2011-05-20 · Watch on YouTube ↗
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