A research vessel finds a missing ship, commanded by a mysterious scientist, on the edge of a black hole. A research vessel finds a missing ship, commanded by a mysterious scientist, on the edge of a black hole.
Rather than a devil or a trickster then, black holes could be the nurturing childhood pals of their galaxies – growing up alongside them and maybe even helping them to form stars.
Gargantua: The most accurate representation of black holes
Black holes have been frequently depicted in movies like The Theory of Everything (2014), The Black Hole (1979) and Star Trek (1979). But did you know that Interstellar has the most accurate depiction of how a black might appear?
Within any black hole is the central point, the singularity, which has infinite gravity and where mass is compressed into an infinitely small point. There, it is game over. There's no surviving. And therefore the idea of traveling through time and space, via black hole or wormhole, don't really register in reality.
Black holes are regions of space where gravity is so strong that nothing can escape them, not even light. Even before you reach the event horizon – the point of no return – you would be “spaghettified” by the black hole's tidal forces. Astronomers do not actually know what goes on inside black holes.
A bizarre Disney-fied mash-up of FORBIDDEN PLANET and STAR WARS, this darker existential story is imperfect but also fascinating. For all its undoubted spectacle The Black Hole is fundamentally a disappointment. Buried within it somewhere is a serious picture with an adult theme but only fragments of it remain.
Directed by Christopher Nolan, Interstellar follows a small group of astronauts who travel through a wormhole near Saturn in search of a new home for humanity. The film is noted for its scientific accuracy and its imagining of a black hole, called Gargantua, has since become iconic.
Technology has advanced enough that we've been able to spot one of these supermassive black holes in a nearby galaxy. In 2019, astronomers took the first-ever picture of a black hole in a galaxy called M87, which is about 55 million light-years away.
The dense center compressed and compressed, "until somehow it blows up and a baby universe is formed within the black hole," Khanna said. This theory, known as Schwarzschild cosmology, suggests that our universe now expands within a black hole that is part of a parent universe.
White holes are the opposite of black holes, in that they spit out light and matter, rather than trapping it. So far, white holes are purely hypothetical objects, but astronomers are contemplating how they could form in reality.
The fate of anyone falling into a black hole would be a painful “spaghettification,” an idea popularized by Stephen Hawking in his book “A Brief History of Time.” In spaghettification, the intense gravity of the black hole would pull you apart, separating your bones, muscles, sinews and even molecules.
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 from top to toe, while stretching you at the same time… thus, spaghetti.
The reason that quasars are more powerful than a black hole is that on its own, a black hole just sits there and has a lot of gravity. Even a supermassive black hole is just that: a lot of gravity concentrated to a very small space.
Black holes have two parts. There is the event horizon, which you can think of as the surface, though it's simply the point where the gravity gets too strong for anything to escape. And then, at the center, is the singularity. That's the word we use to describe a point that is infinitely small and infinitely dense.
The closest black hole to Earth is Gaia-BH1 (also discovered by Gaia), which is 1,560 light-years away. Gaia-BH1 has a mass around 9.6 times that of the sun, making it considerably smaller than this newly discovered black hole.
