Black Holes Don’t Suck (No, Really!)
Black holes have fascinated fans of space and science for a century, and ideas about the nature of these enigmatic objects have changed over the decades. These objects were first predicted, in detail, by Albert Einstein in his General Theory of Relativity in 1916, but ideas of black holes go back even further than his ground-breaking discovery.
In short, the escape velocity of any celestial body — the velocity at which an object needs to travel to escape the gravity of a planet, star, or other body, is dependent on the mass of the body and its diameter. When a star or other object shrinks (while keeping the same amount of mass), the escape velocity from its surface increases. If this escape velocity reaches the speed of light (which no object with rest mass can reach), then no object can escape from the body. Once the escape velocity exceeds the speed of light (denoted as c), then not even light can break free of the gravitational grip of the object, and a black hole is born.
The Four Flavors of Black Holes
At the center of a black hole lies the singularity, where the mass of the object is centered, and where the curvature of spacetime is at a maximum.
Black holes are surrounded by an event horizon, an area where the escape velocity from the object is exactly equal to the speed of light. If you come any…
