Anna Crowley Redding - Black Hole Chasers: The Amazing True Story of an Astronomical Breakthrough

The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the authors copyright, please notify the publisher at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.

To Liam, with love and gratitude, for keeping my feet on the ground and my eyes focused on the stars

A black hole has come for Central City. Chaos erupts. People scramble for cover because, there, in the clear blue sky, is a churning black sphere. Whipping around the black void is a fiery red-orange disk filled with whats left of stars and other cosmic crumbs.

And worse? The black holes powerful gravity is more than Central City can withstand. Street lamps hurl toward the black void. Skyscrapers fracture and give way. Like an epic super-vacuum cleaner, the black hole is ripping everything apart brick by brickdoom is certain. Thats unless comic book superhero the Flash, aka Barry, can save Central City and the planet by flying into that ominous point of no return. Can Barry overcome the most powerful force known to exist?

POP CULTURE ALERT! Emmy awardwinning TV series The Flash premiered in 2014, telling the story of scientist Barry Allen, who is struck by lightning and gains super speed, becoming the fastest man alive. Like any superhero going about his own business, trouble quickly follows, and Barry (the Flash) must use his power for good! This popular TV show, inspired by the comic book series of the same name, is seven seasons strong and still going (as of this writing). Comic Creator: DC Comics; Run: 1940 through 2016. Tagline: Lightning fast action, mystery, and adventure.

Too bad Barry cant ask the crew of the Starship Enterprise for advice. They know what its like to stare down a black hole. In the 2009 movie Star Trek, they find out the hard way what happens when you fly too close to a black hole. Even at warp speed, there is no escape. Cracks spread across the ceiling of the ship. The black hole appears in flashes and it is breathtaking in size and semi-invisibility. The famous spaceship is helpless against the forces of gravity. The black hole is like a magnet with supernatural control. If they dont come up with a plan, the Enterprise and her crew will be lost to the black depths forever.

These plot twists have all the right stuff: clever fiction, actual scienceall tossed together for an outrageous adventure. And lets face it, there is no other cosmic character that commands such credible and certain destruction as a black hole! Powerful. Deadly. Unseen. Nothing in space captures our imaginations like black holes. Nothing.

Black holes are a reliable go-to when it comes to drumming up drama, ratcheting up tension, summoning suspense, and hinting at locked secrets of the universe and those inside ourselves. After all, black holes gobble up anything that gets too close. That much we know. But beyond the basics, black holes represent the limits of human knowledge itself!

Yes, black holes can be the perfect partner in our efforts to explain what we long to discover. Are black holes portals to another universe? A secret door to an intergalactic highway? Do they stalk galaxies, swallowing stars and planets? Are they capable of scarfing down entire solar systems in one fiery gulp? And what happens if a person is sucked up by a black hole? Will they become a long string of human spaghetti? Are black holes star shredders? Terrifying and fascinating. And thats exactly what makes them so cool!

BOOKSHELF:The Care and Feeding of a Pet Black Hole by Michelle Cuevas. The fact that we know so little about black holes makes them the perfect world-building buddy to invent details, powers, and behaviors, like a habit of following kids home from NASA. Thats what happens to fictional character Stella Rodriguez. When she visits NASA and a black hole follows her home, she makes a lot of discoveries. She can explain the anatomy of a black hole and she observes how it eats everything in sight. But the one thing it doesnt seem capable of consuming? Her broken heart. This middle-grade book is less of an intense high stakes sci-fi adventure and more of a love letter to black holes and surviving grief.

Its easy to think you know what black holes actually look like. Our imaginations are that good. Plus, artists have used every tool they have, from pens and paint to sophisticated computer graphics, to create jaw-dropping images. Like magicians, they made real what we could only imagine. They offered space fans an educated guess, often based on the best science. But even though these images were smart guesses, fancy guesses, visually stunning guesses, they were stilljust guesses. These realistic images of a dark force, illuminated only by a bright ribbon of star leftovers slung around this deadly nothingness, well they are so realistic, so awe-inspiring, its no wonder they make for mind-blowing TV and movie scenes, magazine and book illustrations.

But the truth is that no one had seen a black hole. No one. No human being, no telescope, no space bound probe had ever seen a black hole. Ever.

A scientist named Sheperd Doeleman was determined to change that.

It was an impossible goal. One that promised heart-crushing failure.

The technology they needed did not existunless they invented it.

And he couldnt do it alone. He would need a team of scientists to help. But, just like it often happens in comic books, when heroes try to do something impossible, the world was in trouble. Wars were breaking out. Countries were closing their borders. Instead of banding together to solve problems, people were looking at each other with suspicion and distrust.

The quest required nothing less than quick thinking, innovation, perseverance, teamwork, and united dedication to an epic goal: explore and expand the very limits of human knowledge by taking a picture of something that had never been seen beforea black hole.

Black holes are what happens after particularly large stars die. Star death is fairly dramaticespecially when it comes to massive stars, the biggest stars of all. When its their time to die, massive stars go out in a blaze of glory.

Huge, bright, and superheavy, they must be more than eight times the mass of the Sun to be officially labeled massive. These stars spend their lives growing. Expanding and expanding, fueled by constant nuclear fusions at their core. Gravity pulls the mass of a star to its center. But there is another force pushing the star outward from the center. Thats the heat and pressure from the nuclear fuel at the core. These two forces keep a star in check. One pushing out. One pulling in.

That is, until it runs out of fuel.

Then, that multimillion-year-long growth spurt comes to an end and the star collapses in on itself. Imagine those outer edges of the star slamming into the core in less than a second. The impact sets off an enormous explosion. Shock waves rush out into the cosmos. In fact, the explosion is so powerful and large, it has its own name: supernova.