The Secret Life of Space by Heather Couper

Author:Heather Couper
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MBI

Chapter 11

BLACK HOLES

‘This is an object that is not made from ordinary matter,’ muses physicist Kip Thorne. ‘It’s not made of antimatter. It isn’t made of matter at all. It’s made out of a pure warpage of space and time.’

‘Nothing comes out of it; things only go into it,’ continues astronomer Phil Charles. ‘It’s that one-way nature which probably upsets people most, causes them to be really disturbed – and, in fact, causes many scientists to be disturbed.’

Welcome to the sci-fi world of black holes: objects which bend the very fabric of space, defy the laws of physics, and may even be pathways to other universes.

But for all their exotic contemporary connotations, black holes had a surprisingly parochial, genteel – and English – beginning. Visit the village of Thornhill in Yorkshire, and you’ll discover a delightful mediaeval church perched above the valley of the River Calder. In the eighteenth century, it was home to rector John Michell and his family.

Very little is known about the man. There are no portraits; no letters; no personal papers. His memorial in the church reads that he was: ‘Twenty-six years rector of this parish, eminently distinguished as a philosopher and scholar. He had a just claim to the character of a real Christian, in the relative and social duties of life, a tender husband, the indulgent parent, the affectionate brother and the sincere friend were prominent features in a character uniformly amiable.’

We know that Michell was educated at Cambridge, and was certainly a polymath, covering the fields of maths, Greek, Hebrew and theology. But his strongest point was geology. After the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, he published a paper in which he correctly deduced that earthquakes were carried by waves under the Earth’s surface. For this, he was awarded fellowship of London’s prestigious Royal Society.

In 1783, he had been contemplating his other burning passion: astronomy. Michell had been invited to read a paper to the Royal Society, and decided to address the nature of gravity in stars. How, he wondered, did gravity affect the light flooding out of a star’s surface?

Michell reasoned that a very massive star might pull back its own light, just as a ball thrown upwards will fall back to Earth. Then he came up with his masterstroke: ‘All light emitted from such a body would be made to return towards it, by its own proper gravity … if there should really exist in nature any (such) bodies, their light could not arrive at us.’

Astronomer Royal Martin Rees is full of admiration for Michell, who was centuries ahead of his time. ‘John Michell worked out that if you had a body weighing about a hundred million times as much as the Sun, that light couldn’t escape from it. And he went on to say that – for that reason – maybe the most massive objects in the universe might be invisible to us.’

In short, an eighteenth-century English rector had predicted the existence of black holes.

A star 100 million times heavier than the Sun is a physical impossibility.

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