Spaghettification anyone?

Do you know what spaghettification is?


Say a person gets close to a black hole.  First the legs of the person gets pulled and stretched like a chewing gum when it's pulled.  Then the person starts to look like a long spaghetti noodle as the body  gets closer and closer!!  This is called spaghettification.

Now you can imagine other things like stars and rocket ships getting closer to a black hole and may be draw a few.  Here's one I drew about a person and a star too close to a black hole.  Of course they are not to size really.





- Sharko




What happens here?

Lets define what a black hole in the simplest words.  When a big, I mean really big star (much much bigger than our Sun) runs out of fuel, it shrinks and shrinks in size.  It might even become smaller than the size of an atom but keeps the same mass.  This is called a black hole.  Even light cannot escape a black hole.

When that much mass resides in such a small space, (very very dense right), the gravity still is high and anything that comes close to its boundary (also called Event horizon), it sucks it in and gobbles it up.  Eventually the black hole might increase in size as it gobbles up stars and galaxies.  The more mass it gobbles up, the more gravitational pull it will have. 

So, when a person gets close to a black hole, the gravitational pull is more at the legs than the head and so the legs gets stretched/pulled towards the black hole.  Eventually the whole body gets stretched to make it look like a long noodle and so got its name "Spaghettification".  Atleast who ever named it came up with a fun name right...

-Sheela

Sharko posts...

Usually I do a lot of experiments with our son (nickname Sharko) and as he is growing, we have been expanding our discussions about the experiments and topics.  We thought it might be fun for him to write the blog with a little editorial help from me so kids can relate to them better.  So, we will be posting experiments, snippets of amazing science stuff we sniff around etc...To explain how any particular experiments work or theories behind, I will try to fill in or explain to Sharko who will in turn write it in his own words.....Kid's blog for kids...

We will post videos/pictures of the experiments we do at home as well as cool videos etc from other sources too.  Especially videos like this one that we cannot do where we are and time of the year...

As his first blog experiment, he chose to rewatch the video of what happens to hot water in really cold weather...And now I turn the blog to Sharko...

Today we are going to see what happens when hot water is thrown in cold weather.  For this experiment, cold weather means below Freezing temperature.  For example, -30C is very cold and awesome to do this experiment.  Since we dont live in a cold place, we found a video to show.

Watch this experiment -

When you throw hot water in such cold weather, it freezes before it touches the ground. you see a cloud of snow and not water falling to the ground.

The scientific name for this behaviour is very funny.  Its called Mpemba effect.  warm or hot water freezes much faster than normal water!!.  Isn't it cool?

Tornado in a bottle..

Did you know?

(a) A strong Tornado can pick up a house and move it down a block!!

(b) 3 out of every 4 tornadoes in the world happen in the United States!!

(c)  Tornado winds are the fastest winds on Earth!!


Tornadoes are fascinating works of Mother Nature.   Usually when we talk about Tornadoes, they are caused by Wind.  For a Tornado to form, it needs just the right circumstances including warm air from one side and cool air from the other.  Other names for a Tornado include cyclone, twister...

Tornadoes that form on water bodies are called Water Spouts.  Waterspouts are spiraling funnel-shaped wind current, connecting to a large cloud (cumulus or cumulonimbus).

To see how they look, we dont need to wait for one to happen where we live.  We can create one easily at home.

Materials needed:
Two 2-liter bottles
duct tape
water

Fill one of the bottles with water (about 2/3rds of the bottle).  Place the other bottle nose to nose and tape both the noses together.  Be very generous with the amount of tape used as the tighter the tape can hold, less leakage of water and air and better tornadoes.

Turn the bottle with water upside down.  Swirl the bottle in a round motion causing the water to go in circular motion.  When the water moves fast enough, it pushes out against the bottle (while going down the hole), and leaves an open space in the middle.  The air in the lower bottle flows up through this open center up.  The spinning water holds a steady shape going around the sides. This funnel shape is a tornado in a very small scale.

If you look from above, you can see the hole in the middle where the air is coming up.

Have fun!!

Wire that can remember its past...

 Have you bent a metal wire to a particular shape you want and heat it up slightly only to find the wire goes back to its original shape?  Can you imagine the metals we use everyday doing this?  impossible to have a pan in the shape we want and cook!!!

This wire is amazing... Its called NiTinol wire.  It remembers its original shape and goes back to it when heated up.  Before explaining it all, lets do the experiment first.






Here's a piece of NiTinol wire.  Almost straight in shape right...










Bend it into any shape you want.  Here's the same NiTinol wire bent into a waveform.













Take the piece of wire to a heat source.  Make sure you are holding the wire with some device that will protect your fingers/hand from heat.

You can even use a hairdryer to do this.









Keep watching the wire as it changes the shape quite quickly.

Keep the heat source on till you see the wire almost straight again (the shape we started off with!!!)

And here's the wire at the end of the experiment..isn't it cool...







Yes, ofcourse you can bend the wire and keep it in that shape with a little patience and teaching the wire to remember the new shape too but that's another experiment for another day.


What's happening?

NiTinol is an alloy of Nickel and Titanium.  Unlike other alloys, this one has two different crystalline structures.  One of them called Martensite phase is the structure that the alloy prefers while at low temperature and at high temperature, it prefers the phase called Austenite.  During Martensite phase, the crystal structure is such a way that it can be deformed in any direction.  But when its heated to Austenite phase, the structure reverts back to the original form.

Scaring the pepper away...

For this week's experiment in class, I told the kids we will scare some pepper.  Ofcourse questions like how can you scare pepper as its not live to what can scare pepper came up.  I asked them to try making scary faces to see if they could scare the pepper that way.  I told them they cant blow or move the setup to scare but can try anything else that doesnt involve touching/blowing etc... Although by this time the kids know me enough that they didnt agree that maybe we are doing some magic.

But first, here's the experiment.

Take a plate and pour some water (maybe half a centimeter deep).  Sprinkle some powdered black pepper.  Let it rest for a few seconds.  You see that the pepper floats (yes, a few grains that are big enough might sink to the bottom but most of it should float.  








Take a cotton swab, dip it slightly in dishwashing soap.  Now touch/dip the tip of the swab in the middle of the plate without disturbing too much.  What closely while doing it to see what happens to the pepper...

What's happening?

At the top of the plate, all the water molecules are close together (since there are nothing else above them to stick to) thus forming what we call "Surface Tension". When we introduce soap in the middle of the plate, the soap breaks the surface tension as the water molecules now can stick to the soap molecules as well...And it starts radiating outwards with the water molecules trying to pull from the rim of the plate but there is nothing to pull back from the center....so the pepper gets pulled to the rim of the plate soon.  Now that surface tension is broken, you will also see that the pepper starts sinking down as well.

Can you think of another experiment you can do using the same principle?

Eggsperiment with a twist

So we boiled an egg tonight originally to be part of dinner salad.  While peeling the shell, I was thinking aloud that if only we had a glass milk bottle we could do the experiment of getting the egg into the bottle.  Promptly, my husband reminded me that I did bring a bottle from Finland.

So I got the bottle out and put the egg on the mouth of the bottle and ofcourse the egg wouldnt fit into the mouth and was sitting there pretty.

This is what we did to get the egg into the bottle.

Great!!! Now that the egg is inside, how do we get it outside?...one way is to use baking soda and vinegar but wanted even simpler one.  So, borrowed the idea from our film canister rocket experiment and used Alka-Seltzer tablets instead....

Scientific innovations do not know "age-ism"

Have you read bout Jack Andraka?  He is a regular 15yr old attending school..What makes him not so "regular"?  He is an innovator...He came up with a test for cancers such as Pancreatic, lung and ovarian cancers that costs only pennies and is almost always accurate.  The test can be done from home or anywhere and much faster than the tests that are available today (which cannot be done from home either).

Here's an interview in Forbes on him.  Encouraging him to "figure out" things and experiment to get answers is how he says he got interested in Science....Never fails to play with Science right...