Gravity's Engines The Other Side of Black Holes black hole is creation's end point, a one-way exit from

the universe, an enclos ed region of spacetime from which nothing can escape. Gravity's Engines: The Other Side of Black Holes by Caleb Scharf Buy it from the Guardian bookshop Search the Guardian bookshop Tell us what you think: Star-rate and review this book In that sense, black holes are neither here nor there. In practical terms, howev er, these death stars are everywhere and may mean everything to us. There is eve n a tiny one a piffling four million times as massive as the Sun at the heart of the Milky Way, the galaxy we call home. Cambridge scientists announced in Octob er that they had peered through cosmic clouds of dust in the very early universe to identify a new population of supermassive black holes one of them is 10 bill ion times more massive than the Sun at a distance of 11 billion light years. The paradox is that, while the forces within the invisible enclosure of a black hol e are so fierce that nothing, not even light, can get out, these dark stars are also the most radiant things in the universe. A spinning, supermassive black hole is a kind of cosmic-scale battery, says Cale b Scharf: it can produce a pole-to-equator difference of a thousand trillion vol ts, it can propel the tenuous matter swirling around its devouring maw to relati vistic speeds and deliver what is still called a quasar an electromagnetic outpo uring equivalent to the light from 100 billion Suns. It is the most efficient co nverter of energy in the cosmos. It can also puff slow, pulsating bubbles of inaudible sound through the vast gal actic cloud around it, "57 octaves below B flat above middle C in case you were curious. That's approximately 300,000 trillion times lower in frequency than the human voice Supermassive black holes can make you a very, very nice sound syste m." Scharf heads an astrobiology research team at Columbia University in New York, a nd his thesis is that the biggest black holes serve as cosmic regulators: that t hey control the production of stars in the great clouds of gas and dust from whi ch, ultimately, all stars and planets must condense. It could also be the wild c ard, the joker, the blind, haphazard agency that decides whether a galaxy has an y future for photochemistry, organic chemistry, and ultimately, sustained bioche mistry on some randomly ordered rocky planet with running water, reasonably near its parent star in some quiet galactic suburb. The Milky Way, says Scharf, is " smack-dab in the sweet-spot of massive supermassive black hole activity. It is p ossible that this is not mere coincidence." There are 100 billion galaxies out there in the farthest cosmos, each containing at least 100 billion stars. Some of these are spiral galaxies, and the only lif e we know about exists on the outer limb of one spiral galaxy with a relatively quiet black hole at its heart. So the argument is tentative: with a sample of on e, what else could it be? But that's the allure of cosmology. It offers the ghos t of a possibility of an answer to the eternal question: how did we get here? And once again, this heady story of astronomical endeavour and cosmic conjecture prompts a happy mix of marvels. Consider, for example, the gravitational forces acting on a neutron star, an ultradense object one step from total collapse int o a singularity or black hole. To escape from Earth's gravitational field, you n eed a rocket speed of about eight miles a second. To get away from a neutron sta

r, the rocket must accelerate to 62,000 miles a second. If you dived from a spri ngboard one metre above its surface, you would hit the ground at 1,200 miles a s econd. Drop into a black hole, however, and you'd slam through the point of no r eturn at virtually the speed of light. The other paradox of these unimaginable objects is that somebody first had to im agine them. John Michell, a British pioneer of earthquake science in 1783 follow ed the logic of Newton's theory of gravity and proposed a dark star, a star so m assive its own light would return to it. The French mathematician Pierre-Simon L aplace separately arrived at the same reasoning a decade later. Albert Einstein began to explore the way a massive star might distort the fabric of the universe around it. Karl Schwarzschild, a German mathematician and, in 1915, a gunner on the Russian front, worked out the way space and time would be distorted around a massive spherical object. The event horizon, the point beyond which light cann ot escape, is now formally called the Schwarzschild radius. This was more than 7 0 years before a single black hole had been identified. And that's the other delight of this book, and all such accounts of discovery. T hey offer a reminder that, given an understanding of mathematical logic and some lenses with which to make a telescope, one accidental species on one inconseque ntial speck of matter in the 14 billionth year of the universe has been able to identify a few testable laws that govern matter and energy, and from these, and with an arsenal of ever more ingenious telescopes, build up a picture of things that happened far away and long ago, and from that begin to construct a story of everything. The story is provisional. The next generation of space-based and earth-bound tel escopes will almost certainly reveal ever more amazing things, with ever greater precision. Who needs another series of Star Wars movies, when the universal stu dios can go on delivering excitement on this scale? Tim Radford's The Address Book: Our Place in the Scheme of Things, is published by Fourth Estate.