When first discovered, black holes were theoretical phenomena considered mere mathematical curiosities. However, mankind has since proven these marvels' existence and learned that they can be mind-blowingly huge but also vanishingly small.

Black holes are so incredibly dense and heavy that they slow down the passage of time - even light can´t escape them, making them invisible most of the time. When stars come too close, they can get eaten up, creating a giant disk of hellfire and two jets of gas that can travel at nearly the speed of light for hundreds of light years.

We are thrilled to present our newest works from the Universe Spheres series. This time, we've lasered black holes into crystal glass spheres and plates so that you can bring beautiful representations of these awe-inspiring phenomena into your home or office.

 

Since understanding the appearance of a black hole alone is very difficult and the visual representation even on the screen seems insufficient, we were faced with the seemingly insoluble task of immortalizing a black hole in glass. We therefore decided to laser some significant views into our wall lights and to capture a visually appealing black hole event in our spheres.

As in our many previous campaigns, we will listen to your suggestions and refine our motifs/models to make them an incomparable object to behold. But for now, we can proudly present you our Sphere in two sizes, showcasing:

and our wall lights showcasing three views of Black holes. 

Glass is a very versatile and durable material, therefore we can offer different shapes and variants, starting from a simple cube, to our famous spheres, but also illuminated glass panels for wall decoration.

In addition to our great new models, we would like to further develop our wall lights in this campaign and incorporate smart control so that you no longer have to rely on the external remote control. Also, custom color rotations and audio control will be possible.

It sounds like science fiction, but we shoot laser pulses into the glass. These pulses create tiny cracks inside the material, which reflect light and thus become not only visible but also colorful. We use this property to make our educative models comprehensible in three dimensions as well as beautiful to look at and available in different shapes and sizes.

A common misconception is, that Albert Einstein was the first to think about black holes, but in fact, first John Michell in 1783 and later Pierre-Simon Laplace in 1796 suggested their existence for the first time. In 1916 Karl Schwarzschild predicted them to be a theoretically possible solution to Einstein's general theory of relativity, but Einstein himself thought of them as non-physical.

Later Roger Penrose and Stephen Hawking worked on this theory until 2020 a shared noble prize was awarded to Penrose for "the discovery that black hole formation is a robust prediction of the general theory of relativity".

Within a century of Einstein's theory, the black hole theory was proven and already found its way into pop culture. The 2014 film Interstellar featured a black hole that blew the minds of even seasoned scientists.

And then in 2019, the world was thrilled by the first photos of real black holes using the Event Horizon Telescope. One at the center of Galaxy M87 and three years later in 2022 the seemingly tiny one, known as Sagittarius A* at the heart of our own Galaxy, the Milky Way :

Since they absorb all the light around them, we can't see black holes directly, but the surrounding glowing gas reveals a telltale circular shadow in the central region surrounded by a bright ring.

An often-asked question is, why fiction and reality looked so different? The explanation can actually be seen in the blurred picture of our wall light in the Background! We were very surprised ourselves when we noticed this coincidence.

People can't see black holes. They are invisible, but we can observe the behavior of stars nearby to figure out information about the black holes like their mass.

Black holes do not only swallow all light that comes too close within the so-called Schwarzschild radius, but they also change the path of the passing light. The so-called gravitational lensing effect distorts the image behind the black hole, which in turn allows conclusions about the properties of the hole.

And there it becomes mind-boggling. You can basically see hundreds of reflections of the backside of the black hole, which leads to this weird optical illusion when you change perspective.

Here is an overview of the most important parts of a black hole.

Black holes have a reputation for devouring everything in their path.  But some of them like to give as well. A small fraction of supermassive black holes—the ginormous ones that lurk at the centers of galaxies—fire off jets of particles as they snack.

Drawn by the strong gravity, the matter falls toward the central black hole and becomes a disk of hot dust and gas. But instead of being sucked up completely, a small fraction of the particles is accelerated to almost the speed of light and spewed out in two narrow jets along the black hole's axis of rotation. These jets are thought to be the sources of the fastest-traveling particles in the Universe --> cosmic rays.

The largest jet measured so far comes from a black hole in the galaxy NGC2663. It measures more than one million light-years, ten times the diameter of our whole Milky Way galaxy. The Black hole itself is only something like 0,0000026 lightyears in size.

Faced with the complexity and impossible representation of the black hole itself in a Sphere, we focused on the extraordinary event of a black hole consuming a star. We were inspired by the astonishing events of Microquasar SS433 and Cygnus X-1, two star systems in which stars orbit around black holes and feed the jets with their matter.

Here is an overview of our pledge levels. The first two are our Early Birds for this campaign. We don´t want to "just" give a discount like done in countless other crowdfunding campaigns but want to offer you something physical as well.

After the campaign, we will do a survey where you will have the possibility to upgrade the size of your Wall light. 
If you want to do it right away, you are welcome to add the price difference to your pledge.

You will back for a product whose quality you will experience at the latest when you hold it in your hand, because since our spheres and wall lights are not made of acrylic but of high-quality crystal glass, they are heavy, cool, and extremely durable. The spheres are almost unbreakable and the glass of the wall lights will not scratch as easily or yellow as acrylic does. 

Since it is very challenging to capture our spheres on photos, you will surely be positively surprised by the final product.

In every campaign so far we faced some unexpected problems, but that is the risk of creating something new and so far we overcame most of them. This being said you can get an idea of our estimated timeline right here:

In campaigns from other creators, we have seen that shipping fees are often collected after the campaign. This has several advantages for you and us, so we have decided to do the same. This way, we can renegotiate the shipping cost when we create a large order and we can calculate the shipping costs fairer if you order add-ons (there were some difficulties with that in the past).


For a rough estimate for the shipping costs here is a short overview with expected prices:

Meanwhile, we have a professional partner...

...but in the beginning, I packed 4000 packages by hand with my father and my brother.

You are not only backing for a decorative glass object. You are supporting an Idea, the Idea to create products through exploration. We all are explorers that want to find out new things about our own existence. These campaigns are basically the product of my research and creativity about not only, but mostly space stuff. Join us to find out interesting facts, back us to make these journeys possible, and help us spread the word when you find your love inside our glass art.

Every pledge is a token of trust in us we take very seriously and we give a pledge in return to you:

We will do our best and everything we can to send you your items anywhere in the world!
Even through the pandemic with it's crashing logistic routes and exploding transport costs or a war and skyrocketing energy prices all throughout production and shipping we are here and keep working to meet your trust.

It all started with me, Clemens, who always wanted to be an inventor and create new things. After my mechanical engineering studies, my wedding was coming up I needed money for so I tried my luck with Kickstarter. After a very big success right on the first try, I handled the first campaign with the help of my brother and my father. In the meantime, my brother is no longer involved, but friends from my studies are, as well as my father, who adds to his pension as a helping hand.

The black hole in a sphere is part of our Universe Sphere series.

We shortly want to introduce to you a few products of the collection from the past in this chapter.

It all started with the Universe in a Sphere....
The size of our Universe is so unimaginable big, yet not it isn't a random jumble of objects. It has a structure composed of galaxies, gas, and voids. Astrologists call this the cosmic web.

Each one of the 380,000 dots that were laser into the sphere represents an entire galaxy. And this is even only a fraction of the whole Universe. 
 

We then continued with our Milky Way Galaxy made of 200,000 points, but our Galaxy consists of 200 billion stars, so every dot represented 1mio stars, each one with potential planets...

And we then continued with the Starry Sky and its 88 constellations and also created a whole playing cards game with interesting facts about each constellation...

After two thematic excursions, in which we portrayed the microcosm with its cells, bacteria, and viruses and, in a separate campaign, fetal development, we came back to Space with our Solar System in a quite common view, but also true to scale! 

Our products are featuring nature's most interesting and fascinating objects and places, ranging from microorganisms to black holes, making them a unique decoration for your home, office, or even educational tools for the classroom. Displayed on the matching LED base, they are an eye-catcher for young and old.
The Universe Spheres are part of an ever-growing series for you to complete and expand your collection, turning your living space into a Universe of art and science itself!

Within our campaigns, there are some renderings of our products, because in some cases it´s more easy to picture them this way. But in this category, every image is a real photograph made by Clemens of our various products.