My Science School

Some seriously strange stuff – and none of it good. Everything would go dark as your spaceship approached the black hole’s swirling ‘’event horizon,’’ or point of no return. The gravity here is so powerful that even light cannot escape the crushing singularity at the center. Your ship and body would stretch into an impossibly thin and long line, like toothpaste squeezed from its tube. As you approached the speed of light, time would slow and eventually stop, although you wouldn’t be alive to notice. 

 

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Astronomers can’t see these mighty munchers of matter, but they spot their effects across the galaxy. Black holes form when stars 20 times larger than our own sun run out of fuel and go ‘’supernova” – or explode. The dying star’s core collapses under its own gravity until it scrunches into a singularity – or tightly packed point – smaller than an atom. Despite its tiny size, the singularity still packs a gravitational pull many times stronger than our sun. Like a cosmic whirlpool, the black hole pulls in anything – asteroids, planets, other stars, and even light – that gets too close.

 

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Because charged particles cast off from the sun hit the Earth’s magnetic field 100 miles (160 km) up, making the air molecules glow green, violet, blue or red. These curtains of light are called auroras. The best spots to see the aurora borealis (or northern lights) are Alaska, the northwestern regions of Canada, the southern tips of Iceland and Greenland, Norway, and Siberia, The aurora australis of Southern Hemisphere is trickier to see unless you live in Antarctica.

 

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That sunshine beaming through your windows might seem completely see-through, but this ‘’white light’’ is actually composed of many colors – a literal rainbow of them. Astronomer Isaac Newton noticed these colors than 300 years ago when he held a special piece of glass called a prism to the sunlight. The prism bent the light into its seven component colors, or wavelengths. Raindrops in the sky act like millions of tiny prisms, scattering the sunlight into its seven colors. A rainbow blossoms into living color when you see it from sunny spot, which is why it looks like rainbows form after a storm.

 

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It’s been worn by kings and queens, swiped by jewel thieves, and was once feared lost in a ship-wreck, but the Hope Diamond is best known for its history of unhappy owners. King Louis XVI lost his head in the French Revolution. More than a hundred years later, a woman who wore the diamond became convinced it was cursed after her husband, eldest son, and daughter all died. She refused to sell the stone for fear of passing along the curse, and it was later donated to the Smithsonian Institution.

 

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Diamond form in a variety of colors – from white to black, blue to green, and pink to purple – but the rarest color of all is red. Unlike with other colors (which are caused by chemical impurities), red diamonds result from a rare quirk in the carbon’s molecular structure. Red diamonds’ rarity makes them extremely valueable.

Basically, pure red diamonds do not exist or rather have not been found so far. The available ones are fancy purplish red or brownish red. The red color in combination with other high-quality 3Cs makes them priceless. The two famous red diamonds ever sold are the Moussaieff Redand the Hancock Red Diamond. These diamonds are among the most famous diamonds ever mined. The current value could be extraordinarily high.

 

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Weighing 1.37 pounds (621 gm) and measuring more than four inches (10 cm) long when it was discovered in 1905, the Cullinan Diamond is the largest diamond ever found. It was cut into nine other diamonds, the largest of which has an estimated value of $400 million.

The diamond was then dispatched to England where it would be entrusted to Premier's London agent, Sigismund Neumann. To ensure the diamond reached its destination safely it was sent to England in an unmarked postal box, while a replica was publicly accompanied by detectives on a steamer from South Africa as a diversion.

The diamond was later bought by the Transvaal government, which had been reconciled with England after the Anglo-Boer war, for £150,000 and presented to King Edward VII as a goodwill gesture on his 66th birthday on November 9, 1907.

 

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Earth’s most valuable gemstone is also its hardest natural surface. Only a diamond can scratch another diamond. These rugged rocks are forged 100 miles below your feet, where the molten temperatures and intense pressure of Earth’s mantle put the big squeeze on carbon, one of the planet’s most common elements (your body is nearly 20 percent carbon). Clusters of carbon atoms mash together over billions of years into a dense and rigid pattern. The end result: diamonds. Eventually, lava pushes veins of these rocks toward the surface, where they look more like pieces of glass than glittering  jewels – until a jeweler cuts and polishes them. Scientists figured out how to replicate this process in the 1950s to create itty-bitty artificial diamonds for the tips of cutting tools and industrial drills.

 

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Carving through 277 miles (446 km) of Arizona, U.S.A, and up to a mile (1.6 km) deep in places, the Grand Canyon exposes millions of years of geological history in layers and layers of colorful rocks. The canyon is proof of the power of water over stone. The raging waters of the Colorado River (along with other forces) carved the canyon over millions of years – a process known as erosion.

The Grand Canyon pink rattlesnake is the most common snake in the park, startling hikers as it suns itself on rocks and sandy trails, searching for lizards to eat. Strong geologic evidence suggests the Colorado River broke out of the west end of the Grand Canyon about five million years ago, and no sooner.

 

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Tiny creatures are responsible for the color of the cliffs, which stretch for eight miles (13 km) along England’s coastline. The cliffs began to form 70 million years ago when a shallow sea covered the region. Microscopic algae called coccolithophores floated in this sea. When they died, their white calcium skeletons sunk to the bottom, forming a white mud that grew thicker over time. When the seas receded, the mud dried into the white, crumbly chalk we see on the cliffs today.

 

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Tourists flock to see this geyser blow its top – launching superheated water vapor up to 185 feet (56 m) high – every 92 minutes in Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming, U.S.A. Geysers are rare geological features, and Old Faithful is doubly rare for its regularity. Researchers were baffled by the punctuality of its eruption until recently, when they managed to chart its subterranean plumbing. It turns out that a large chamber beneath Old Faithful fills with steam bubbles boiled by the molten magma below. Those bubbles become trapped in a tube that leads to the geyser’s mouth. The tube gradually fills with water, the pressure builds, and – whoosh – Old Faithful erupts right on schedule.

 

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