Who first discovered black holes? Albert Einstein first predicted the existence of black holes in 1916, with his general theory of relativity. The term “black hole” was coined many years later in 1967 by American astronomer John Wheeler. After decades of...
What do black holes actually do? Black Holes, explained. These infinitely dense points in space will spaghettify anything that ventures too close. Black holes are points in space that are so dense they create deep gravity sinks. Beyond a certain region,...
Do black holes have a lifespan? Black holes have a finite lifetime due to the emission of Hawking radiation. However, for most known astrophysical black holes, the time it would take to completely evaporate and disappear is far longer than the...
What happens if you get sucked in a black hole? 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...
Do black holes stay in one place? Black holes stay in one place But that’s not the case. Like stars, planets, and everything else in the Universe, black holes are mobile. In fact, the first gravitational waves detected in 2015 were...
How do black holes get bigger? A common explanation for this mismatch is that black holes grow over time by gorging on gas, dust, stars and even other black holes. But because black holes often form after giant stellar explosions called...
Is a black hole a real thing? Scientists have found proof that every large galaxy contains a supermassive black hole at its center. The supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy is called Sagittarius A. It has...
What is inside black hole? The singularity at the center of a black hole is the ultimate no man’s land: a place where matter is compressed down to an infinitely tiny point, and all conceptions of time and space completely break...
What is a black hole outburst? The black hole’s strong gravity pulls material away from the companion star into a disk surrounding the black hole. Some of this material is blasted away from the black hole in a pair of short...
What happens when a black hole exploded? Answer: Black holes don’t really “explode”, which implies that they generate a large outburst of energy which ultimately tears them apart, but they do have outbursts (also, unfortunately, referred to as “explosions”). What happens...