• Question: What exactly is a black hole?

    Asked by anon-223739 to Valerio, Sreejita, Sam, Kate, Anastasia, Adam on 18 Nov 2019.
    • Photo: Sreejita Ghosh

      Sreejita Ghosh answered on 18 Nov 2019:

      Thanks again for this question. I looked up and found videos by my favourite Physicists and Science communicators explaining this. I have gone through all the videos before posting here and if I had tried I might have been able to write a few lines about it. But that would have been second hand experience for you and it wouldn’t have been honest. Plus these are some wonderful and interesting 4-5min lectures which I thought you might enjoy 🙂

      The first is by Prof. Dr. Brian Cox

      Next one is by Prof. Dr. Michio Kaku

      This is from the science communication forum Piled higher and deeper by Jorge Cham

    • Photo: Adam Wootton

      Adam Wootton answered on 19 Nov 2019:

      A black hole is basically something in space that is really, really, really heavy, but also, really, really, really dense. To give you an idea of how heavy a black hole can be, the black hole at the centre of our galaxy is 4.3 million times as heavy as our Sun! This makes it 90,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 times heavier than a typical human! Relatively speaking, though, it’s quite small – despite being 4.3 million times heavier than the sun, it’s only 14 times bigger. This means that it’s really dense.
      .
      All of this means that black holes have an incredibly strong gravitational field that can even influence light. When you get to a special distance from the black hole, called the event horizon, not even light can escape from being sucked into the hole!

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