The Smallest Black Hole

You wonder what you’d find in a black hole?
Your other sock? A dime? A baby mole?

I’ll tell you where you will find none of those:
In Cygnus X-1 only darkness shows.

A star one hundred times our own Sun’s mass
Collapsed upon itself and turned to gas.

It tore a hole in space I cannot find
A way to understand in my own mind.

A place I cannot draw or get my eyes on,
Where all is lost on its event horizon.

A place where things fall in and go bye bye.
No peep, no burble, not even a sigh

Comes back to notify us of their plight.
Nothing gets out from there, not even light.

Things disappeared for eons. No one missed ’em.
They had been swallowed by a binary system!

Now they’ve found a hole that’s just a baby,
The smallest yet, the smallest ever, maybe.

An X-ray pattern comes from gas white-hot.
It lets them hear the “heartbeat” of the tot.

They hear its heartbeat. Just imagine that!
If only they knew where your sock is at!

References
http://www.forbes.com/sites/alexknapp/2011/12/17/nasa-satellite-may-have-found-the-smallest-known-
black-hole/
http://www.forbes.com/sites/alexknapp/2011/11/19/new-data-provides-a-complete-description-of-a-black-
hole/

(Copyright 2018 James Mansfield Nichols. All rights reserved.)