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I waved him off with my hand. He didn't have to explain. In any case, before I realized what he was getting at, I experienced the essence of it. We were suddenly some thousands of light years above the center of the Milky Way, looking down on it as it were a huge circular carpet of stars with a bright center and spiral like arms extending from it.
"What do you see?" he asked as we moved towards the other side of this wheel of countless millions of stars. The stars lay stretched out beneath us like an immense three dimensional computer graphics display that one can rotate at will and view from all angles as the computer translates its image according to mathematical processes.
"I see an amazing labyrinth, too vast to imagine," I said to him. "I see our world as but a speck in a vast sea of solar systems that may all be totally empty. Do you think there maybe other civilizations in the Milky Way?"
He nodded. He showed me however what we came to view, one single rather large star near one of the arms of the galaxy. The star was significantly brighter than most. As we drew closer, it stood out bright against the sea of lesser stars.
"There, can you see it?" he said and pointed to an inconsistency in the background that looked like a ring of stars around a dark void. As we moved closer, the stars that formed the ring began to dance, twirling every which way around the void like a living crown gracing an invisible god.
Martin explained that the gravity of a collapsed star of ten thousand solar masses is sufficient to totally disrupt the distribution of energy in the space surrounding it, so that light can no longer be propagated in the normal manner.
"You can't propagate ripples across a pond that has no water in it," he said with a grin.
I just nodded. The whole thing was like a fairy tale to me that strangely made sense.
"What appears like a black hole," he said, "is in reality one of the brightest objects in the universe."
I nodded again. He could have told me anything. Who was I to doubt him?
"You can tell that a ten-thousand solar mass star is inside there," he said, "even though you can't see it. You can see its effect. The ring of dancing stars is an interesting optical illusion, isn't it?"
He explained that light is propagated at different angles and speeds across areas of different energy density surrounding the black hole.
"The whole thing acts like a giant distorted lens."
He explained that one could also say that the space around it becomes "geometrically curved in some fashion as space typically is." He grinned when he said this. "That's how you can tell that there is an immensely massive star inside the black hole," he added moments later.
The whole thing appeared like magic to me. Of course he was right when he said that I hadn't seen anything yet. Still, it made sense in a way. He said that space, emptied of its energy background, can't conduct light. That made sense. Then I thought of something that became of astonishing significance only much later after we had returned to the ship. If no light escapes from the planet inside the black hole, no light can pass to it. Not only does the brightest type of star in the universe appear as a black hole to us in this manner, but the entire universe in which we live must in like manner appear as a black void when seen from the vantage point of this star. In essence it appeared as if this star had indeed slipped out of our universe at the moment it became contracted into its super dense form. It was as if it were transposed into a universe of its own, one that is totally isolated, akin to the captain in the humanist sense.
As I began to ponder these things, the effects of the black hole became more and more fascinating. Soon we were near enough to see a marvelous light show of optical magic. The large star that Martin had pointed out earlier became torn apart in front of my eyes. Then within moments, it became reassembled again into thin threats of light that painted a pinwheel across the black hole. Moments later the pinwheel disappeared and the star re-assembled itself.
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Stories about
Love
from novels by Rolf A. F. Witzsche
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