On Thursday 13th November, physicist Nesh Patel visited year 6 to discuss space, black holes and astrophysics. This is what Year 6 had to say…
We learnt that if life is possible (and it is because we exist), other life forms should be out there, somewhere really far away in another galaxy. Furthermore, if we were to travel to another galaxy and look onto earth with a SUPER powerful telescope, we would see ancient people instead of the modern world.
As stars burn they could get smaller and turn into white dwarves, or they could get bigger and bigger. When they finally die, gravity wins and they implode infinitely deep, creating a black hole. When stars implode it causes an explosion, this is when the star goes into supernova. When a star goes into supernova it’s hotter than all of the heat it produced in its ENTIRE life time! The only pictures of black holes we have are artist impressions of it.
The average black hole (believe it or not) is ten times heavier than the sun: the size of half of Northampton yet still the mass of ten suns.
If anything goes near a black hole there is so much gravity it gets sucked towards it. If you were getting sucked into a black hole you could not run away because not even LIGHT can escape. That means you would have to travel faster than light which isn’t possible because of the laws of physics.
‘The most exciting part was when Nesh told us the different speeds needed for different objects to get off Earth, Jupiter and the Moon.’ Harvey.
‘I couldn’t believe how fast light travelled,’ Finley
‘I thought the pictures Nesh showed us of different galaxies were amazing.’ Adam.