Black holes have two parts. There is the event horizon, which you can think of as the surface, though it's simply the point where the gravity gets too strong for anything to escape. And then, at the center, is the singularity. That's the word we use to describe a point that is infinitely small and infinitely dense.
A jump into a black hole is a one-way trip. Black holes are regions of space where gravity is so strong that nothing can escape them, not even light. Even before you reach the event horizon – the point of no return – you would be “spaghettified” by the black hole's tidal forces.
Anything that passes the event horizon is trapped within the black hole. But right as gas and dust get closer and closer to the event horizon, the gravity from the black hole makes them spin really fast … forming lots of radiation.
Most experts agree that the universe started as an infinitely hot and dense point called a singularity. Wait a minute. Isn't that what people call black holes? It is, in fact, and some physicists say they could be one and the same: The singularity in every black hole might give birth to a baby universe.
Ever since Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity was considered to have predicted black holes by linking space-time with the action of gravity, it has been known that black holes result from the death of a massive star leaving behind a small, dense remnant core.
The inequality suggests that to destroy a black hole, all you need to do is to feed it angular momentum and charge. But that hides a multitude of problems. For a start, things with angular momentum and charge also tend to have mass. And in any case, the equation above describes a steady state.
Near a black hole, the slowing of time is extreme. From the viewpoint of an observer outside the black hole, time stops. For example, an object falling into the hole would appear frozen in time at the edge of the hole.
Absolutely not. While a black hole does have an immense gravitational field, they are only “dangerous” if you get very close to them.
Our universe is but one in an unimaginably massive ocean of universes called … the multiverse. If that concept isn't enough to get your head around, physics describes different kinds of multiverse. The easiest one to comprehend is called the cosmological multiverse.
Eventually, the entire contents of the universe will be crushed together into an impossibly tiny space – a singularity, like a reverse Big Bang. Different scientists give different estimates of when this contraction phase might begin. It could be billions of years away yet.
As black holes evaporate, they get smaller and smaller and their event horizons get uncomfortably close to the central singularities. In the final moments of black holes' lives, the gravity becomes too strong, and the black holes become too small, for us to properly describe them with our current knowledge.
Black holes are dark, dense regions in space where the pull of gravity is so strong that nothing can escape. Not even light can get out of these regions. That is why we cannot see black holes—they are invisible to our eyes. Because nothing can get out of black holes, physicists struggle understanding these objects.
If you leapt heroically into a stellar-mass black hole, your body would be subjected to a process called 'spaghettification' (no, really, it is). The black hole's gravity force would compress you from top to toe, while stretching you at the same time… thus, spaghetti.
A white hole is a black hole running backwards in time. Just as black holes swallow things irretrievably, so also do white holes spit them out. White holes cannot exist, since they violate the second law of thermodynamics.
Located just under 1,600 light-years away, the discovery suggests there might be a sizable population of dormant black holes in binary systems. The black hole Gaia BH1, seen in this artist's concept near its Sun-like companion star, is the closest black hole to Earth discovered so far.
There is only one planet Earth.
According to NASA, time travel is possible, just not in the way you might expect. Albert Einstein's theory of relativity says time and motion are relative to each other, and nothing can go faster than the speed of light, which is 186,000 miles per second. Time travel happens through what's called “time dilation.”
There's a limit to how much of the universe we can see. The observable universe is finite in that it hasn't existed forever. It extends 46 billion light years in every direction from us. (While our universe is 13.8 billion years old, the observable universe reaches further since the universe is expanding).
Judging from the number of stars large enough to produce such black holes, however, scientists estimate that there are as many as ten million to a billion such black holes in the Milky Way alone.
It is possible for two black holes to collide. Once they come so close that they cannot escape each other's gravity, they will merge to become one bigger black hole. Such an event would be extremely violent.
Super-distant black hole is eating half a sun a year and blasting its leftovers at Earth. Astronomers have made the most distant observation of a black hole ripping apart a star and feasting upon it, thanks to a jet of stellar "leftovers" blasted directly toward Earth.
One hour for a black hole observer would equate to 100,000,000 years for a person on Earth. Therefore one minute in a black hole would be roughly 1,700,000 years.
Wormholes are shortcuts in spacetime, popular with science fiction authors and movie directors. They've never been seen, but according to Einstein's general theory of relativity, they might exist.
Once inside the black hole's event horizon, matter will be torn apart into its smallest subatomic components and eventually be squeezed into the singularity. As the singularity accumulates more and more matter, the size of the black hole's event horizon increases proportionally.
The fate of anyone falling into a black hole would be a painful “spaghettification,” an idea popularized by Stephen Hawking in his book “A Brief History of Time.” In spaghettification, the intense gravity of the black hole would pull you apart, separating your bones, muscles, sinews and even molecules.