CHAPTER III
A PLUNGE INTO A BLACK HOLE
BLASTO’S RADICAL “SLINGSHOT”
PLAN
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“Let me explain, Sir, why we must head in towards the center
of the Galaxy in order to get to its outer halo,” said Blasto.
“The Pupa's engine is OK for short trips, like a lightyear (about
1x1012 miles, or a million million miles), but for longer trips we must
use a special technique to gain speed or our journey will take us far
too long. It’s called the “slingshot” technique.”
 “What!,” cried Galaxy Man! “Use a slingshot
against a giant? Are you CRAZY Blasto? Hah, hah, hah!” To this teasing,
Blasto responded with uncharacteristic irritation, “Well, metal mouth,
I guess you have never heard the story of David and Goliath. And any way,
I’m not talking about using a hand-held slingshot. I’m talking
about using the powerful gravitational forces of our Galaxy’s nucleus
to accelerate us to high velocities.”
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“At our current speed,” said Blasto, “we would
be ancient history before we ever got to the first interstellar
stoplight.” “I’m in no big rush, Blasto,”
said Galaxy Man. “I’ll just put some more quarters in
the dryer.” “Get real, Sir,” sighed Blasto. “The
Galaxy’s disk is about 300,000 light years across. That’s
about 2,000,000,000,000,000,000 miles (or 2x1018 miles).
Add two zeros if you want to measure it in 50-ft school buses
put end-to-end.” And, of course, Blasto was right again.
To get a feel for how reeeeeeeally BIG the Galaxy is,
think of a huge distance, like the 250,000 miles from the Earth
to the Moon. To us, that is a vast distance. Even if we traveled
at 1,000 mph, it would still take about 10 days
to get there. But that distance is almost too small to measure
on a galaxy-sized ruler.
For example, if you take the 250 thousand miles and multiply it
by 4, you get a million miles - still too small to count for much
on the scale of a galaxy. If you multiply the 1,000,000 miles
by 1,000 (= 1 billion miles), the distance is still a pipsqueak
compared to galaxy-sized distances. To get to the size of a galaxy
you would have to multiply again by 1,000, then multiply again
by 1,000 and finally multiply again by 1,000. That’s 4,000,000,000,000
times the huge Earth-Moon distance. Yup, that’s 4 trillion
times a distance that is already immense.
Even light, which travels at over 700,000,000 miles
per hour, takes about 300,000 years to cross
the Galaxy. Let’s face it, these galactic distances and speeds
are very different from anything we are used to, so it’s
hard to get an accurate feeling for their sizes. Learning
the actual numbers helps us to carry on when our intuition fails
us.
“So, Sir, we must plunge into the heart of the Galaxy
because that is where the stars , and other forms of matter, are
so densely packed. In some places just a teaspoon of
the compact matter would weigh billions of tons! We will gain
speed rapidly until we reach 99.9999% of the speed of light. Time,
for us anyway, will nearly stop, and we will shoot out of the
galactic disk's flat plane and into its spherical halo.
“Jump out of a plane!? Get real! Surely you must be joking
Blasto!”, said Galaxy Man incredulously.
“No, Sir, we never leave the Pupa. It’s a relativistic
effect.”
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 "I had a relative once," mused Galaxy Man.
"Poor thing crash landed on a water planet and rusted away to nothing!
Tell me more about this relative effect, Blasto." With a look of
disbelief, Blasto begged off, "Well, ahh, it's a long story, Sir,
and I wouldn't want to bore you. Let's save R-E-L-A-T-I-V-I-T-Y for another
time. I'll just head for the center of the Galaxy and explain more as
we go. Maybe you should be on the lookout for those red giants."
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At this suggestion old chrome-dome's body started whirring and clicking
all over. "Brilliant idea, Blasto! I'll use the periscope to cover
our tail! Or at least your tail, Blasto, since I don't really have,
ya know, a tail, so to speak." To this Blasto replied, "Well,
Sir, metaphorically speaking you could be said to have one, but let's
not worry about it. Covering my tail will be plenty to keep you
out of trouble."
"What!", cried Galaxy Man. "I was just saying that you'll
be keeping a lookout for trouble, Sir", replied Blasto.
"Oh, I see. Right you are, Blasto", said the reassured captain
as he stood a bit taller.
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THE MONSTER IN THE MIDDLE
(TINY BUT SOOOOOOO HEAVY)
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While the G-Man watched Blasto's tail through the combination periscope/telescope,
Blasto explained that the stars are more and more crowded as as you go
toward the center of the Galaxy. They also race around like out-of-control
3 y ear olds. On
the monitor he brought up a telescopic image of the Galaxy's inner nucleus,
which looked something like a gyroscope. Stars and donut shaped clouds
of gas and dust furiously whirled around a little black dot at the very
center. "You may know what that little black dot is," said Blasto,
but Galaxy Man was totally clueless, as usual. "Is that a period
in the very center?," said the remarkable robot, "or a black
jelly bean?" With a sigh, Blasto replied, "Indeed not my stupi...,
I mean, my stupendous leader. That is a gravitational black hole
that weighs at least a million times more than a star. It is a totally
awesome thing that devours anything that gets too near it, including us
if we’re not careful!”
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“That sucks!,” growled Galaxy Man. “Entirely right,”
said Blasto with a big grin. "Black holes are real suckers!
They’re also awesome spitters! See those jets of stuff being
shot out of its North and South poles. No one completely understands
why that happens, but the black hole sucks in all the matter that
gets too close, and spits out a bunch of it at nearly the speed
of light."
GALAXY MAN GOES TO THE BATHROOM
Now young Blasto could explain his MASTER PLAN to his master.
“Sir, that black hole is surrounded by a fearsome whirlpool,
where stars are ripped to shreds and everything is sucked in.
The black hole will pull us in faster and faster until we nearly
reach the speed of light. That’s what we want. If we don’t
go close enough, we will never gain enough speed to make it to
the halo. BUT, if we go too close, then we get sucked into THE
MOTHER-OF-ALL-VACUUM-CLEANERS and shredded in a femtosecond"
(which is 10-15 seconds or 0.000000000000001 seconds).
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At this news, Galaxy Man’s face  took on a slightly
greenish color and he spoke rather softly for a change. “If you will,
um, excuse me Blasto. I have to go to the bathroom. It may be for a while.
Could you steer until I get back?” With a hint of a smirk on his
face, Blasto said, “But of course my fearful, leader." "Ah,
come again, Blasto?", said the very worried looking captain. "I
said 'of course, my fearless leader'.” To himself Blasto wondered,
“What does a robot do in a bathroom?”
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A BRILLIANT MANEUVER
With great skill and confidence young Blasto aimed just above
the black hole. The Pupa had begun to make a low humming noise
as the extremely high speed caused the whole ship to vibrate.
As the pitch of the noise went from a low hum to a high piercing
scream, The Pupa did a flip around the black hole, and rocketed
off in a new direction. The maneuver caused Blasto some intense
dizziness, but he let out a triumphant wolf-howl when he saw that
he had pulled off the interstellar move of the century.
