10 Craziest Facts You Didn't Know About Black Holes
Everything you had to google after watching Interstellar.
In this huge and baffling universe, there are few things more huge and baffling than black holes. Everybody's heard of black holes, but aside from knowing that they're black, a hole and immensely terrifying, few people know much about them.
One of the reasons for this is probably because learning even the smallest amount of information about black holes is enough to drive you mad with existential-crisis inducing questions.
Those who aren't fans of being kept up at night have likely been lead to believe that black holes are like great space plug holes, sucking up anything in the nearby vicinity like an intergalactic vacuum cleaner.
While this isn't fully the case, the reality is much, much crazier...
10. Hungry Hungry Black Holes
Although it isn't the whole story, there is some truth in the idea that a black hole acts like a hoover as they have the strongest gravity in the universe that we've seen, gravity that fully kicks in at a place around a black hole known as the 'Event Horizon' - the 'event' being imminent death and the 'horizon' being all that separates you from it.
The gravity is so strong that even light can't travel fast enough to escape! This is why black holes have that dark complexion that gives them their chillingly eerie name, because there is simply no light being emitted or reflected to look at.
As you can imagine, having no light makes them pretty difficult to see, which is why astronomers have to use other means like X-Ray telescopes to get any idea about what they are.
If light can't travel fast enough, then you sure as hell can't. Get too close to that event horizon and there is only one certainty, you're going down that plug hole.