8 Things You've Always Wanted To Know About Black Holes

7. The Singularities That Aren't There

Right, let's get something straight about singularities. Ask anyone what is at the centre of a black hole, and they will most likely say that it's a singularity, you might even picture it as a tiny little dot at the centre of every black hole.

Actually, the truth is that no black holes contain a singularity and this is largely due to the fact that they don't exist.

Singularities don't belong in the physical world, they are essentially computational errors by scientists. Singularities are infinitely dense and infinitely small one-dimensional points of space that are predicted by Einstein's theory of general relativity. The problem is that the idea of "infinity" doesn't exist in the real world - general relativity only predicts singularities because it is not complex enough to explain objects as extreme as black holes.

Scientists know that when infinities begin to show up in their calculations, they've got something wrong. The reality is that "singularity" is science speak for "f***ed if we know".