Many Shippensburg University students and local residents filled the seats of the Luhrs Performing Arts Center and watched SU president George “Jody” Harpster open the lecture by introducing Janna Levin.
Levin presented her thoughts and findings concerning black holes at Luhrs on April 22. Levin is a cosmologist, a person who studies the origin and structure of the universe.
Nature makes these phenomena’s we refer to as “black holes,” Levin explained. Black holes are casted shadows that are more of an actual place than just a thing. John Wheeler, a physicist, coined the word “black hole” in the 1960s, because someone in the audience at one of his events encouraged the term.
SU student, Tyler Wilson, attended the lecture to learn more information as a physics major. During the presentation, he gained an in-depth explanation of black holes. He was amazed by how they are able to collide and the vibrant noises made from the collision. He learned that black holes are an absence of matter.
A black hole is purely gravitational and because of that, it has a mass on the inside. Somehow, mass stays in the center or is completely gone. There is no matter, or objects, inside of a black hole. When a star collapses, it continuously falls and creates a black hole. Astronomers say that once stars have collapsed, they form gravitational waves.
Two black holes may orbit one another, Levin explained, and that orbit may create a sound once the two collide into each other. When two black holes collide, the gravitational waves may be measured, and because of this, changes in the Earth can be measured. Once the two collide, Levin theorized that the collision could possibly make supermassive black holes by absorbing many other black holes.
The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Hanford Observatory (LIGO) seeks to catch these ripples in space. The Hanford instrument may only predict a few gravitational waves per year that can be heard and caught by the instrument.
Levin mentioned that Albert Einstein expressed his personal opinion that the universe expanding is improbable, but that time is relative. Also, time can be distorted, depending on locations. A great example of this is how phones automatically correct the relativity of time. Levin also described the fact that there may be many different distorted dimensions that we are unaware of and that some may be small and others big.
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