Going, going, gone.

For all the talk of terminal velocity and the "event horizon" (which as we all know is a boundary in spacetime), no-one is really sure of what a black hole looks like. Why would they be? I would have thought it was very, very black and not much else.

However, there are pictures out there. Here's one from a press release from the Marshall Space Center(sic):



It's supposed to be a picture of a black hole ripping a star apart and consuming part of it. Ridiculous!

It's obviously a kidsilk haze shawl in the "blushes" colour being swallowed up.

Here is what they say is an "artist's impression of a supermassive black hole at the centre of a galaxy":



but is obviously a kidsilk haze shawl in the swish colour slipping quietly into the maw of the black hole.

Artist's impression??

Here's the real deal:



This is a photograph, never before seen, of a kidsilk haze shawl in the "heavenly" colour - how much more appropriate? - being sucked into the whirling vortex.

Even though I have knitted two whole balls of the heavenly stuff, and even though the rows are becoming perceptibly longer, my overall impression is that it is not one inch bigger.

This is obviously a paradox, possibly the Black Hole Information Paradox - it sounds very like it.

An anonymous commenter asks if the pattern for all these shawls will be made available. I can honestly say it hadn't entered my head. If I can wrestle this one out of the black hole and make any sense of all the squiggles (technical term) on the many bits of paper scattered round the house and learn how to use Excel to make charts and learn how to make a pdf file and learn how to put it all together and get it in the sidebar? It might just be a maybe.