On page 20 of the March 2004 issue, you say the 3-billion-solar-mass black hole in the center of the galaxy M87 has an average density about that of air. I would love to understand how this makes any sense. The…
What would happen if I fed animatter into a black hole? Could this be a treatment to get rid of black holes? No. Antimatter has positive mass just like ordinary matter, so the black hole would merely get larger and…
Black holes are so massive that they severely warp the fabric of spacetime (the three spatial dimensions and time combined in a four-dimensional continuum). For this reason, an observer inside a black hole experiences the passage of time much differently than an…
Black holes are so massive that they severely warp the fabric of spacetime (the three spatial dimensions and time combined in a four-dimensional continuum). For this reason, an observer inside a black hole experiences the passage of time much differently than an…
There are a couple of answers to the question, “How do black holes form?” Different types of black holes form through different processes. Stellar-mass black holes are born when very massive stars (typically tens of solar masses) explode in supernovae.…
Black holes are singularities: points of infinitely small volume with infinite density. Such incredibly compact objects cause infinite curvature in the fabric of spacetime. Everything that falls into a black hole is sucked toward the singularity. At some distance away…
Black holes seem to be the stuff of science fiction (and, in fact, have starred in many sci-fi books and movies), so it’s not uncommon for people to wonder, are black holes real? As it turns out, the answer is…
Wormholes, alternate universes, time warps — we’ve all heard crazy theories about what happens inside a black hole. So what’s the real story? The short answer is, physicists don’t know. A somewhat longer answer is, it depends on whom you…
A quasar is a supermassive black hole feeding on gas at the center of a distant galaxy. Quasar is short for quasi-stellar radio source, because astronomers first discovered quasars in 1963 as objects that looked like stars but emitted radio waves.…
We’ve all seen portrayals of black holes in popular media, but since we know there actually are black holes in space, just what is a black hole? A black hole is a region of space where the force of gravity is so strong that the escape…