The goal of this blog is to create a list of super facts. Important facts that are true with very high certainty and yet surprising, misunderstood, or disputed by many. This blog aims to be challenging, educational, and fun, without it being clickbait. I determine veracity using evidence, data from reputable sources and longstanding scientific consensus. Prepare to be challenged (I am). Intentionally seek the truth not confirmation of your belief.
Black holes, everyone has heard of them, no one understands them. They are inscrutable monsters in the sky. They are regions of spacetime wherein gravity is so strong that nothing can escape, not light, not anything. Some of them are small, only 15 kilometers across, and some have a diameter 27 billion times larger than that.
As you get close to a black hole your time will run slower. You won’t notice it, but others will see you move in slow motion. If you return from your close encounter an hour on your clock might correspond to years elsewhere. As you approach the event horizon, the boundary of no escape, you become invisible and time will stop, at least from an outside view.
Black holes are invisible. They are truly black. However, we can see them if they are consuming matter. The matter close to black holes will heat up and glow. The closer to the event horizon the redder it is. It is called an accretion disk as in the depiction above.
There are an estimated 100 million black holes in our galaxy, the Milky Way. At the center of the Milky Way is a super massive black hole called Sagittarius A-star. It is 4 million times more massive than our sun. There are supermassive black holes located at the center of most large galaxies. The supermassive black holes are considered to play a crucial role in the formation of galaxies.
I’ve looked up in the sky, and I’ve seen the spot where Sagittarius A-star is located. I’ve tried to look at it with my telescope, but I cannot see it. It is not possible to see it with a telescope, but it is there. The picture above may depict the view from a planet in the center of our galaxy. Three scientists received the Nobel prize in physics in 2020 for their research on black holes (Roger Penrose, Reinhard Genzel, and Andrea Ghez).
However, before them the tele evangelist Jack Van Impe won the 2001 Ig Nobel Prize in Astrophysics for his discovery that black holes meet all the technical requirements for Hell. The Ig Nobel prize is an alternative and less serious Nobel Prize. To find out more about Black Holes click here.
The goal of this blog is to create a list of what I call super facts. Important facts that we know to be true and yet they are surprising, shocking or disputed among non-experts. Special facts that any well-informed person should know.
Paperback – $18.95 on Amazon – future release March 25, 2025.
Hardcover – Publisher : Princeton University Press; First Edition (September 12, 2023), ISBN-10 : 0691177295, ISBN-13 : 978-0691177298, 240 pages, item weight : 1 pounds, dimensions : 5.75 x 1 x 8.5 inches, it costs $18.95 on Amazon. Click here to order it from Amazon.com.
Kindle – Publisher : Princeton University Press (September 12, 2023), ASIN : B0C5SBB26C, 229 pages, it costs $15.37 on US Amazon. Click here to order it from Amazon.com.
Audio – Publisher : Princeton University Press (September 19, 2023), ASIN : B0CF6WHBVX, listening length 7 hours, narrator : Christopher Ragland, it costs $0.99 on US Amazon. Click here to order it from Amazon.com.
Front cover of Elemental. Click on the image to go to the Amazon page for the hardcover version of the book.
Amazon’s description of the book
It is rare for life to change Earth, yet three organisms have profoundly transformed our planet over the long course of its history. Elemental reveals how microbes, plants, and people used the fundamental building blocks of life to alter the climate, and with it, the trajectory of life on Earth in the past, present, and future.
Taking readers from the deep geologic past to our current era of human dominance, Stephen Porder focuses on five of life’s essential elements—hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus. He describes how single-celled cyanobacteria and plants harnessed them to wildly proliferate across the oceans and the land, only to eventually precipitate environmental catastrophes.
He then brings us to the present, and shows how these elements underpin the success of human civilization, and how their mismanagement threatens similarly catastrophic unintended consequences. But, Porder argues, if we can learn from our world-changing predecessors, we can construct a more sustainable future.
Blending conversational storytelling with the latest science, Porder takes us deep into the Amazon, across fresh lava flows in Hawaii, and to the cornfields of the American Midwest to illuminate a potential path to sustainability, informed by the constraints imposed by life’s essential elements and the four-billion-year history of life on Earth.
The Story of HOCNP the Five Elements Essential to all Life
The author, a biogeochemist, explains why five elements, hydrogen (H), oxygen (O), carbon (C), nitrogen (N), and phosphorus (P) are essential to all life. As an example, in the sunlit waters of the central equatorial Pacific Ocean, a lack of Nitrogen creates a water desert with no life. Lifeforms that are able extract more of these elements have a competitive advantage.
This book focuses on three world-changing organisms that were able to extract unprecedented amounts of these elements from the environment also resulting in success and huge increases in the total mass of lifeforms, as well as consequences causing mass extinction eventually followed by an entirely new planet. Note this book is not about mass extinctions, which have happened at least five times, but something more profound. It is about planet-changing events.
During the first two billion years of earth’s history there had been no oxygen in the environment; oxygen was always bound to some other atom, such as hydrogen in water. There was life back then but in the form of primitive bacteria using a primitive form of photosynthesis involving sulfur. Then came cyanobacteria which had invented a more effective form of photosynthesis, as well as a way of extracting nitrogen using a process called nitrogen fixation. The two-atom nitrogen in the air is nearly inert and very difficult to use. This made cyanobacteria extremely successful.
However, one consequence was that the carbon dioxide was largely removed from the atmosphere, while the atmosphere was filled up by oxygen, which is a byproduct of the new form of photosynthesis. Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas that warms the planet, something scientists had already figured out in the 1850’s. With much less carbon dioxide, the earth got very cold, and a snowball earth disaster followed. However, in the long run the oxygen paved the way for the existence of multicellular life and animals. The planet changed.
About 400 million years ago plants was a new type organism that was able to extract water (hydrogen and oxygen) from land as well as phosphorus. Their success led to another depletion of carbon dioxide causing another ice period, but they paved the way for life on land. The planet changed again. Now humans, the third type of organism, are extracting all five elements in unprecedented amounts causing global warming and other unintended consequences.
Unlike cyanobacteria and plants, we are not doing this to primarily extract nutrients but for transportation, heating and consumer products and we can control and predict the consequences of our actions.
As evidence for global warming / climate change the author discusses the temperature measurement records of various organizations (NOAA etc.). That is the smoking gun.
However, he also mentions things like the fact that the vast majority of glaciers in the world are retreating or disappearing and the fact that anyone above the age of 50 who comes from a northern climate (that would be me) can attest to the fact that winters have gotten noticeably shorter snow seasons and warmer summers. That is true and it is a good thing to mention because there are those who are quick to dismiss temperature records as big hoaxes.
The second part of his global warming discussion, the evidence that we humans are the cause of the current warming, leaves something out in my opinion. He explains why the various climate models provide incontrovertible evidence that the chief cause for the current global warming is our burning of fossil fuels, despite the models being far from perfect. I totally agree with that, but once again there are those who are not willing to accept climate models as solid evidence, and therefore you should mention other evidence as well, which he does not do.
Examples of evidence that we are the cause and that does not involve complex models would be, no known natural cause can explain the current warming, the upper troposphere is cooling while the lower troposphere is warming, the arctic is warming much faster than average, nights are warming much faster than days, etc. Those are things that would not happen if the cause was a hotter sun (which we also kept a record of) or an orbital cycle.
In addition, spectral analysis shows the cause to be the adding of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, and various isotope studies show that the carbon emissions come from the burning of hundreds of millions of years old carbon. Why not mention that as well? I know all this is baked into the models, but simple explanations appear more convincing to many. I am not taking off a star for it, but I felt it was a missed opportunity.
One environmental threat that you don’t hear much about is the depletion of phosphorus. This is something that may be far into the future but something that seems impossible to solve once it arrives and could evolve into an enormous food crisis. This was certainly a unpleasant surprise to me.
The book explains many processes and concepts, biogeochemistry, primitive photosynthesis using sulfur, photosynthesis using water (cyanobacteria) and releasing oxygen, nitrogen fixation, endosymbiosis, how plants extract phosphorus from the ground, the evolution of plants, the slow carbon cycles, the fast carbon cycle, the effect of volcanoes on climate, respiration, why can trust certain aspects of climate models, nitrogen fixation, nitrogenase, the immense effect fertilizers have had on food production, the Haber-Bosch process, earth’s climate history, why phosphorus is both finite and irreplaceable, the danger to aquifers, how we have changed ecosystems, and more.
Despite that the author makes himself understood. He explains complex concepts, so they are easy to understand and connects them all in a logical way that makes a lot of sense. So don’t be afraid that the book will be difficult to read. You may just learn a lot.
The author considers climate change / global warming to be our most serious environmental challenge, but he offers a lot of suggestions for a way forward. He discusses a lot of interesting technological solutions. I think he may be a bit gloomier than necessary but overall, what he says is very insightful and somewhat hopeful.
Again, I was very impressed by the organization of the book. It is easy to create a mess when you try to connect a lot of different concepts and complex science into a logical narrative, but he was very successful. It was a delight to read this book, it was interesting and full of facts, which were new to me, and I think are very important. I learned a lot and I think it is a very well written page turner.
Back cover of Elemental. Click on the image to go to the Amazon page for the kindle version of the book.
3D illustration of giant Black hole in deep space. High quality digital space art in 5K – realistic visualization. Stock Illustration ID: 2476711459 by Vadim Sadovski.
Superfact 15: A black hole is a region of spacetime wherein gravity is so strong that nothing can escape it, not light, not anything. There are different kinds of black holes. We don’t fully understand black holes, which makes them very interesting to science. The boundary of no escape is called the event horizon. Black holes are invisible. They are truly black. However, we can see what they do to their environment as they consume surrounding matter. Below are some bizarre facts about black holes.
Time runs much slower closer to a black hole.
An object falling towards a black hole will become redder, faint, then infrared, then invisible and all its movements and clocks will freeze.
From the perspective of an outside observer, time appears to stop for someone reaching the event horizon of a black hole. Time will continue for someone falling in.
At the center of a black hole may lie a gravitational singularity, a region where the spacetime curvature becomes infinite. However, since we cannot peer into a black hole we cannot know.
The largest known black hole (TON 618) is more than 287 million times more massive than the most massive known star (R136a1).
If our planet earth collapsed into a black hole, it’s diameter would be 1.75 centimeters or 0.69 inches in diameter. The diameter of the largest known black hole (TON 618) is 242 billion miles, which is more than one million times larger than the distance from the earth to moon.
There are supermassive black holes located at the center of most large galaxies, including our Milky Way. The Milky Way’s black hole is about 4 million times the mass of the Sun.
Astronomers estimate that there are around 100 million black holes in our Milky Way.
When an object (maybe a spaceship, or a person) approaches or falls into a black hole the difference between the gravity on the parts closer to the black hole and those further away will be so large that the object is stretched and ripped apart. This is called spaghettification.
Stretching from the event horizon and out another half radius of the black hole is a region called the photon sphere. In the photon sphere light will travel in a non-stable circular orbit around the black hole. Light will go around and around for a while. If you are in the photon sphere you might be able to see the back of your head.
Above is just a small sample of weird black hole facts.
The understanding of black holes requires the General Theory of Relativity, and it is still a lot we don’t understand about them. Stock Photo ID: 2024419973 by Elena11
The Bizarre Reality of Black Holes
I chose the Bizarre Reality of Black Holes as a super-fact and included the ten facts above because these facts are shocking and yet not well known. Below is a photograph of a supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy M87 taken by the event horizon telescope in 2017. To create the picture below image processing was needed. It is the first photograph of a black hole. This supermassive black hole is an estimated 6.5 billion times as massive as our sun, and 28 million times as massive as the largest known star.
The photo of the supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy M87 taken by the event horizon telescope in 2017. Uploader cropped and converted TIF to JPG – This file has been extracted from another file, CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=77925953.
The fact that from the perspective of an outside observer, time appears to stop for someone reaching the event horizon of a black hole seems to prevent anything from falling into a black hole from an outside perspective. How does anything ever get inside the black hole if it freezes up at the event horizon? Black holes grow, they collide and merge, so clearly things can get inside, right? But how? As I tried to find the answer to this question, I found that I was far from the only one asking this question.
Realistic spaceship approaching a black hole. This content was generated by an Artificial Intelligence (AI) system. Stock AI-generated image ID: 2448481683 AI-generated image Contributor Shutterstock AI Generator.
I searched physics forums trying to find the answer to this question. There were a lot of discussions but no clear answers. Some said, nothing falls into a black hole. Everything accumulates on the event horizon from the outside perspective and that’s how the event horizon and the black hole grows. The observer crossing the horizon essentially jumps infinitely far into the future, or into a different universe, that’s how he can pass through the event horizon.
Others said that the black hole is not static, it grows, and it shrinks from Hawking radiation, and this complicates the equations so that objects can enter the black hole even from an outside perspective. I have a few physics books on black holes that I have not finished reading. If I learn something better, I will update this post.
AI-generated image Description : Space Black Hole Blue Illustration Gravity Geometry Vast Line. Stock AI-generated image ID: 2457551367 by AI-generated image Contributor Shutterstock.AI
In the image above the grid demonstrates how a black hole is distorting space-time. Other strange facts about black holes are that they are slowly evaporating through what is called Hawking radiation.
They come in different sizes. The smallest known black hole (XTE J1650-500) has a diameter of approximately 15 miles. Perhaps scariest of all, black holes are nearly undetectable unless they are feeding on star dust or tugging on nearby stars. That means one hungry black hole could be zipping right through our solar system without us knowing. Considering there are an estimated 100 million black holes in our Milky Way space travel might be scary.
Addressing a Good Question
After posting this post I received a question via email regarding this fact “If our planet earth collapsed into a black hole, its diameter would be 1.75 centimeters or 0.69 inches in diameter. The diameter of the largest known black hole (TON 618) is 242 billion miles, which is more than one million times larger than the distance from the earth to moon.” The person who asked thought that 1.75 centimeters was pretty tiny and was wondering how a black hole could be that small.
To create a black hole, you need extremely strong gravity and one way to increase the force of gravity at the surface of a planet is to compress all its mass into a smaller volume.
If you compressed all of earth’s gravity so its diameter was only half of what it is, it would be more compact, and the gravity would be four times stronger at earth’s surface. If you compressed it further so that the earth’s diameter would only be a fourth of its original diameter the gravity at the surface would now be 16 times stronger. If you keep compressing the earth until its diameter is only 1.75 centimeters the force of gravity at the surface would be 132,000 trillion times greater than it currently is according to Newtonian physics, and you would get a black hole.
I should say that it comes out differently with General Relativity and that number is different for different sized black holes. However, this calculation is for demonstrative purposes. For relatively small masses like a planet, you would have to compress so much that it becomes tiny before gravity becomes large enough to make a black hole.
So I am trying out the Daily writing prompt for the first time, answering the question “What alternative career paths have you considered or are interested in?”.
I’ve always been interested in astronomy and astrophysics, and I studied engineering physics, later electrical engineering. I did not think astronomer or astrophysicist was an easily attainable career and perhaps not very well paid either, but I think it would have been a fun job to have.
I am a bit of an amateur astronomer, and I own a basic telescope for amateurs, a Celestron Powerseeker 70EQ. It is not a great telescope, but it is good enough for observing objects such as Saturn and its rings, Jupiter and its four Galilean moons, Mars, Venus (the crescent), the moon and its craters. Those objects you can see from inside a big city like Dallas. Naturally you can do much better if you leave the city and especially if you visit a dark spot. I am a member of TAS, Texas Astronomical Society and they own a dark spot in Oklahoma. Below is a photo of my Celestron Powerseeker 70EQ standing in my garage.
Celestron Powerseeker 70EQ
What Does an Astronomer Do?
Astronomers study the universe, including galaxies, stars, planets, and other celestial objects, using telescopes and other instruments to observe and analyze them. They observe and analyze celestial objects. Depending on their specific area, astronomers have different duties.
They observe celestial objects using telescopes.
They conduct research, analyze data and test hypothesis.
They use and develop models including complex mathematical models and computer simulations to understand complex astrophysical phenomena.
They collaborate with peers, they teach, and they do mentoring and public outreach.
Types of Astronomers
Observational Astronomers use telescopes and other observational instruments to collect data from celestial objects.
Theoretical Astrophysicists use mathematical models and computer simulations to understand the physical processes in the universe. They may study stellar evolution, galaxy formation, cosmology, and black holes.
Planetary Scientists study planets, moons, and other objects within our solar system. They use data collected by space missions, telescopes, and remote sensing techniques.
Stellar Astronomers study stars, their properties, and their life cycles. They may study variable stars, binary star systems, massive stars, stellar remnants such as white dwarfs, neutron stars, or black holes.
Galaxies and Cosmology researchers study galaxies and the large-scale structures in the universe.
Radio Astronomers study celestial objects using radio waves instead of visible light. They may study radio galaxies, cosmic microwave background radiation, and the structure of the Milky Way.
Exoplanet Astronomers study and discover planets orbiting stars outside our solar system. They use techniques such as transit photometry and radial velocity measurements to detect and characterize exoplanets.
Famous Astronomers
Nicolaus Copernicus 1473–1543, discovered the heliocentric model putting the sun at the center of our solar system.
Johannes Kepler 1571–1630, revolutionized our understanding of how planets orbit the Sun. He used the Copernicus heliocentric model and very careful measurements to show that the planets moved in elliptical orbits around the sun and he came with additional laws to describe the speed of the planets in their orbits.
Galileo Galilei, 1564–1642, or Galileo di Vincenzo Bonaiuti de’ Galilei, was an Italian astronomer, physicist and engineer who greatly improved the optical telescope and discovered the four primary moons of Jupiter and the rings of Jupiter. He proved that all falling bodies fall at the same rate, regardless of mass, and developed the first pendulum clock. He got in trouble for defending Nikolai Copernicus idea.
Edmund Halley, 1656–1742, investigated and discovered many things including the nature of comets’ orbits.
Edwin Powell Hubble, United States, 1889–1953. Hubble proved that many objects previously thought to be clouds of dust and gas and classified as “nebulae” were galaxies beyond the Milky Way. He showed that these galaxies were moving away from us and each other leading to the conclusion that the universe was expanding.
Vera Rubin, 1928–2016, studied the rotation of galaxies and uncovered the discrepancy between the predicted and observed angular motion. This led to the discovery of dark matter.
What about you? What alternative career paths have you considered or are interested in?
“Supermoon October 2024” is not a super-fact post but some fun facts about the Moon. It is a super-moon post instead.
As many of you probably have read, we currently have a so-called supermoon (October 17 & October 18). The moon’s orbit around earth is not a perfect circle but slightly elliptical. Therefore, the moon’s distance to earth varies.
A supermoon is when a full moon occurs when the moon is at its closest point to Earth, called perigee, making it appear larger and brighter than usual. Or more correctly, the term supermoon is usually used to describe a full moon that comes within at least 90% of the perigee. Since this is a special moon event, I took out my little telescope and looked at the moon and its craters. I also took a look at Jupiter, and I saw three of the four Galilean moons.
Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.comThe green speck is Jupiter. The three little dots are three of the four Galilean Moons. I roughly saw this in my telescope an hour ago, but it is not my photo. Photo by Raoni Aldrich Dorim on Pexels.com
This is a very common misunderstanding. The moon is always showing the same side towards us (or almost exactly the same side). When there is a full moon the backside, or far side, of the moon is dark, but that is not the case when the moon is half, or a crescent, etc. When the moon is new, the far side / backside is “full” from sunlight. If you wondered, NASA and other space agencies have photographed the far side of the moon.
The near side of the Moon and the far side of the Moon. Comparison between the two hemispheres of the Moon. Elements of this image were furnished by NASA. Stock Photo ID: 2157518223 by Claudio Caridi.
Below is a youTube video showing an animation composed of actual satellite photos by NASA.
A few comments about this animation. You see no stars because the sun is shining, and the earth is also quite bright. The reason you don’t easily see stars during the day is not because the sky is blue but because there is too much light to see them. The sun ruins the starry sky. In addition, stars are not easily captured by cameras when there is ambient light. And again, of course, contrary to the belief of some, the backside of the moon is not always dark.
The far side of the moon is different
As you can see in the YouTube video and the enhanced photo above, the far side looks different from the nearside and it is different in appearance and terrain. The near side of the moon has large, dark, flat-lying basins called maria. They look like oceans. The far side is a lot more rugged and covered by lots of craters. Another difference is that the far side of the moon has a much thicker crust compared to the near side.
The moon is drifting away from earth at about 3.8 centimeters per year
The moon is moving away from earth due to the gravitational forces between the moon and earth, which also causes tidal bulges in the Earth’s oceans and the moon. Back in high school I took a physics test on which you had to calculate how much the moon was moving away from earth based on the size of the tidal waves on earth. I did not solve that one, but not many did. The calculation made perfect sense though and some geniuses got it.
NASA found water on the moon
In 2020, NASA announced the discovery of water on the sunlit surface of the Moon. You can read about it here.
The moon was likely created by a celestial collision : The most widely accepted explanation for the existence of the moon is that the Moon was created when a planet-like object, the size of Mars slammed into Earth, soon after the solar system began forming. That was about 4.5 billion years ago.
Super Facts 