• Question: what was the most amazing fact that you learned about black holes?

    Asked by 828sptm42 to Ollie, Angus, Christine, Guy on 5 Mar 2018. This question was also asked by 589sptm27.
    • Photo: Guy Rixon

      Guy Rixon answered on 5 Mar 2018:

      That they evaporate! Black holes can lose mass-energy by quantum events at their edges. In very small holes, this can carry away all the mass quite quickly. That’s why we see holes a few times the mass of the Sun, and really big ones millions of times that size, but no small ones.

    • Photo: Alexander Burke

      Alexander Burke answered on 8 Mar 2018:

      There are so many cool things that black holes can do.

      1. As Guy said, they can evaporate – Stephen Hawking came up with this idea.
      2. How they effect both time and space due to their incredible amount of gravity.
      3. How they could be portals to other universes.
      4. And many, many more.

      One thing that fascinates me is: What exactly are black holes made up of? This is an incredibly difficult question to answer and I will give you my interpretation of what a black hole is made of.
      Black holes are NOT made of anything you can think of. They are not made out of stone, or planets, or star stuff. Black holes are made out of the very “space and time” that we describe the universe by. In layman’s terms, a black hole is made out of incredibly heavy “universe stuff”. This is such a strange concept since black holes have a “weight” so surely they should be made up of stuff… right? No. The measurement of their mass comes from how “strongly” they bend the space and time in their surroundings. In summary: The above is my own personal opinion of what a black hole is made up of. The other engineers may have other ideas of their structure. This is a good question to ask physicists in future!

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