The other day Dave, Tess, and I went up to the Clark planetarium in Salt Lake and watched a movie about black holes. I went in thinking the movie probably couldn't teach me much about black holes and that I could learn more by reading space a science news sites. I always assume movies shown at museums are outdated.

Well, I was wrong and the movie was awesome. Besides some cheesy in-house animation, the movie was really informative and showed what we know about black holes, talked about Einstein-Rosenberg bridges (worm holes), and the mass of some of these black holes.

One of the most amazing things I learned is that once a black hole compresses matter so much, it simply ceases to exist. The now gone matter leaves behind only its gravity. This is pretty cool because the matter probably goes SOMEWHERE, but where it goes would be independent of its space-time sphere.

So, theoretically, if I understand correctly and my assumptions are correct, and mathematical point sized ball of immense gravity and compressed matter could appear at any place at any time. Watch out!

One of the theories about stars dying is that they send out a gravitational shock-wave. I don't really understand all of it, but basically they have some really big instruments that can detect these gravitational changes and they are currently searching for them. These instruments bring in a lot of data which must be processed, and the project uses distributed processing power. So basically you download a program, and it will get bits and pieces from the Einstein@Home servers, and my computer will run calculations trying to find these gravitational waves. Pretty cool, eh? I am now responsible, in part, for future breakthroughs in our understanding of the Universe.

Here is a picture of the client running on my computer.

The sphere is made up of the constellations in our sky. They are backwards because we are viewing them from way outside in space. Earth would be situated in the middle of this sphere. You can see the milky way on the left, curving towards the center.

This little globe just sits and rotates, looking all cool. That means that not only am I helping science, but when people walk by I look like I'm doing something really important (which, I mean, I guess I am).