When reading our blog posts, you might find yourself asking what the scale of the black holes, jets, or accretion disks we speak of are. If that is the case, then this post is for you! Given that Halloween just happened, let us choose our base unit as one Jack-o’-lantern pumpkin (JOLP) that is 20 kg heavy and 0.5 meters in diameter. For scale, roughly four JOLPs stacked on top of each other would span a human that is 1.8 meters tall and 80 kg heavy. Right, then how many JOLPs would we need to span the entire circumference of the Earth? Well, we would need about 80 million (80…
Read More >>The microphysics of astrophysics: protons and electrons reveal the existence of black holes
My name is Dimitris Kantzas and I am a PhD student in Sera’s group. My research is focused on studying the multiwavelength radiation emitted in the vicinity of accreting black holes in order to better understand how these sources radiate, where exactly this radiation originates and if this radiation affects the physics and the morphology of these accreting black holes and their local environments. But what are black holes? Where are they located, and how can we detect them? Black holes are regions of the spacetime with a very strong gravitational potential that doesn’t allow anything to escape, not even light. Black holes are everywhere in the Universe and we…
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