What Was The First Black Hole?

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at first it is barely noticeable among

the millions of points of light that

crowd the sky

this area of space is far from dark

illuminated as it is by the light of a

million stars crowding a hundred million

times more densely than they do around

the earth

a central cluster of suns wheel around

at an incredible pace spiraling towards

a singular static point of light the

center of their and every other star's

orbit

and it is here where the oddness of this

central body begins to reveal itself

instead of a smooth circle of light in

the crosshairs the object appears as a

vast glowing ring cross-cut just below

the equator filled at its center by a

black deeper even than the surrounding

nothingness

and it is now you realize this is the

black hole

but it is not just any black hole

this is the supermassive black hole at

the center of our galaxy

sagittarius a star up to this point you

have been propelled towards this curious

body under your own power but there now

begins a subtle tug towards it

you find yourself in an orbit around its

middle along with a glowing band of

accreting material which is lensed into

a halo by intense gravity within the

accretion disk you're pounded and

pummeled by fast moving gas dust and

debris and intense frictional heating

causes the entire disc to radiate at

high energy blasting your body with

x-rays and gamma rays your dna is

damaged beyond repair

but soon

that won't matter

it is at this point

reality starts to strain

from the perspective of a distant

observer the closer you approach to the

inner edge of the disc the slower you

seem to fall but as far as you're

concerned time is passing normally

now even if you could escape everyone

you know and their distant descendants

are already dead

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and it isn't just time that warps

assuming you approach the black holes

gaping more feet first then your lower

body will be experiencing a stronger

gravitational pull than your head your

entire body begins to distort although

the effect isn't as severe as it could

be a supermassive black hole like

sagittarius a-star only has a moderate

gravitational gradient compared to their

smaller stellar counterparts

this continues until after an observer's

eternity your feet hips and finally head

cross the event horizon

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passing this point is the end of your

time in the wider universe

beyond the event horizon the gravity is

too strong to let light or any signal

you may survive to send escape

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you

are shut off

forever

inside everything is turned on its head

time and space trade places and beyond

the event horizon it is time itself that

pulls you down towards the center no

force in the universe can stop this just

as nothing can stop the flow of time

itself what you experience inside no one

can say and certainly not you even if

impossibly you survived irradiation

spaghettification and the aging of the

universe then your voice would be

forever silenced by gravity itself

all that is left is the slight mass

increase of the leviathan that consumed

you a mass increase that will only help

your captor pull in more victims

such is the fate of anyone or anything

unlucky enough to fall into the mouth of

a black hole

first mooted in 1783 the

incomprehensible horror of these

ultimate galactic predators has captured

the imagination of scientists and pushed

the boundaries of science for decades

indeed the supermassive variety are

thought to reside at the center of every

galaxy and may well be the agents of

their creation

while black holes can bring about

ultimate destruction their supermassive

counterparts can also feed and fuel the

very stuff of stars planets

and life

but many of these supermassive black

holes also leave us

with a mystery

just how did they get so big in the

first place

if they are the seeds of galaxies then

what were their seeds

and finally when and indeed what

were the first

black holes

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rain clutters harshly on the tin roof of

the rudimentary shelter

it is channeled down and collects into

the growing gutter of water that winds

its way through the muddy trench and

past the sodden boots of the young

soldiers who huddle for warmth beneath

the darkening december sky

the gunfire and shelling has mercifully

stopped for now and the senior

lieutenant ducks inside the little

refuge to turn his attention to the pile

of dispatches on the desk

it is 1915 on the eastern front of world

war one and the lieutenant

is karl

svartshield

smartshield is an accomplished theorist

and mathematician and the director of

the astronomical observatory in potsdam

even so the relentless pressures of the

great war see him sign up for the war

effort and squat in his great coat

alongside the harrowed soldiers of the

german army but tonight his attention is

caught by a familiar handwriting on the

wrappings of a bulky envelope instantly

he recognizes it as the hand of his

friend and colleague albert einstein

entitled the field equations of

gravitation the paper within lays out

the mathematical basis for what will

become known as the general theory of

relativity and all of our modern

understanding of gravity on cosmic

scales

incomprehensible to all but the most

involved theorists it describes an

elegant formulae how mata causes

space-time to curve and how space-time

tells mata how to move

svartshield holds the paper in trembling

hands and that evening risks a dim and

flickering electric light to read and

study einstein's work with delight the

circular reasoning of the scholars

equations may be mathematically elegant

but this also makes them notoriously