We speculate about it, but it is just speculation because this event horizon, this imaginary region around the black hole, forbids information of any kind to be transmitted from the interior to the exterior of the black hole. Once you cross that event horizon, it is inevitable that you will continue to fall to what remains an unknown fate. They suck everything in, but they contain nothing. And I think that is a really intriguing concept for people to wrap their heads around, because it's a shift from the normal image of a black hole. So the star continues to collapse interior to the event horizon, leaving behind nothing, empty space.Īnd like an archeological imprint, this event horizon is a record in the shape of spacetime. That star can no more hover around the event horizon than it can travel faster than the speed of light. It doesn't mean that the star as an object is the black hole because crucially, it continues to fall.
It's as though you were trying to launch a spacecraft off the surface of this collapsing star and you would have to go faster than the speed of light to escape it. And so what the star does when it collapses, is it creates a curvature in spacetime that's so strong that eventually, yes, when the star gets dense enough, you create what we call an event horizon, a region beyond which not even light can escape it. What the black hole is, is the remnant left behind after a star is totally gone. I love it because people often will say, aren't black holes a dense state of matter? And that's a confusion. Why is that such an important concept to grasp? You spent quite a bit of time making sure that people understand that black holes are actually nothing. I wanted to combat the preconceived notions about black holes to kind of shuck away the veneer and expose the fascinating attributes of black holes that I think are lesser known, but yet are really more core to their definition than the ones that are floating out there.īlack Hole Survival Guide by Janna Levin. Why frame this as a survival guide for black holes? And it turns out, it's a trip that we maybe, possibly, could even survive - at least, briefly.īob McDonald spoke with Professor Levin about her new book Black Hole Survival Guide. In Black Hole Survival Guide, physicist Janna Levin takes us on a virtual adventure through the cosmos, to experience what it would be like to travel to - and into - a black hole. And now, thanks to a new book, we can do just that. While these sinister, perplexing whirlpools of destruction aren't exactly on the top of anyone's must-visit list, sometimes, it's fun to imagine.
There are billions of them in the cosmos, and they shape the galaxies we live in - and yet we can't really see them.
Black holes are puzzling entities. They're massive, but somehow they're nothing.
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