What is a black hole and how are they made? Can life actually exist around black holes and could these cosmic enigmas be gateways to parallel universes? Find out the answer to these questions and more...
Welcome
All About Space Black Holes
50 AMAZING FACTS ABOUT BLACK HOLES • Few things are as universally awe-inspiring and terrifying as black holes. These invisible behemoths are the great architects and the great destroyers of the universe
THE SCIENCE OF BLACK HOLES • Head into a world where the laws of physics are pushed to the extreme
How black holes are made • The deaths of giant stars birth these behemoths
Famous black hole candidates
Anatomy of a black hole • What makes up these gargantuan gobblers?
Different kinds of black hole
What happens at the centre of a black hole? • All of the possibilities are very weird
STRANGEST STAR IN THE UNIVERSE • Black holes might be collapsing stars that are exploding in slow motion
What we think we know about Planck stars
Bluffer’s guide: loop quantum gravity • How to make two of our competing laws of physics match up with each other
What we need to know about Planck stars
How do Planck stars form? • These stars form in a similar way to black holes, but with some crucial differences
Five facts about black holes • Here are five things we know about these unusual objects that play a crucial role in Planck stars
WHERE DO BLACK HOLES LEAD? • If you could journey through the cosmos’ most monstrous objects, what tales - if any - would you be able to tell?
The theories • Where do scientists believe information plunged into a black hole may end up?
The white hole • Nobody has ever seen a ’reverse black hole’, but what could they look like in theory?
Bluffer’s guide to black holes • Explaining the key jargon and concepts that are essential in understanding these high-gravity objects
Event Horizon Telescope • The EHT is the first-ever experiment to capture an image of a black hole
PLANET NINE CONTROVERSY THE SOLAR SYSTEM’S BLACK HOLE • As the hunt for a mysterious world at our solar neighbourhood’s edge steps up, something more exotic might also fit the bill
James Romero • By monitoring a billion stars, we are finding the fingerprints of rogue planets, stars and possibly black holes
Residents of the outer Solar System • What else lies in this cold region of space?
A breakthrough in reaching the outer Solar System • How a mission to Alpha Centauri has inspired an approach to pinpoint our mysterious outer Solar System object
The Vera C. Rubin Observatory: how it will help find Planet Nine • In 2021 the Vera C. Rubin Observatory will come online, spending ten years searching the entire southern sky for objects of all types beyond Neptune
WHAT LIES BETWEEN NEUTRON STARS AND BLACK HOLES? • There has long been thought to be a mass gap between these two cosmic heavyweights, but does the theory need to be revised?
THE MASS GAPS BY THE NUMBERS
Observing collision events • LIGO-Virgo has been key to the discovery of many mergers through the detection of gravitational waves
The theories • What could the mystery object discovered
What gaps in our knowledge remain? • Maya Fishbach is a postdoctoral fellow at Northwestern University and a member of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration
THE POWER OF SUPERMASSIVE BLACK HOLES • Intense, insatiable and found at the centre of galaxies: take a look at the engines that give these cores a high-energy boost
The engine of a powerful galaxy • Pulling apart an active galaxy reveals a cosmic high-energy motor
Earth’s nearest quasar
Sources of...