Black Holes

When really massive stars die, they turn into the strangest things in the universe- Black Holes. A black hole has such an incredibly strong force of gravity nothing can escape from it, not even light! Although black holes are invisible, their gravity reaches far into space. This gravity pulls things towards it, such a gases from a near by star. To find black hole, astronomers look for the effect of its gravity.


A black hole is a region of spacetime exhibiting such strong gravitational effects that nothing including particles and electromagnetic radiation such as light can escape from inside it

Famous Black Holes

• Cygnus X-1: a stellar-mass black hole and x-ray source that lies some 6,500 light-years away. It is a binary system that contains a blue supergiant variable star and the x-ray source thought to be the black hole.

• Sagittarius A : the supermassive black hole at the heart of the Milky Way Galaxy. It lies in the direction of the constellation Sagittarius. This black hole contains the mass of about 4 million suns.

• M87: this elliptical galaxy has a 3.5 billion solar-mass black hole at its heart. The black hole is surrounded by a disk of superheated material and has a jet of superheated material streaming away from the black hole that extends across 5,000 light-years from the galaxy’s core.

• Centaurus A: this galaxy, which lies in the direction of the constellation Centaurus, is a giant spiral galaxy with an incredibly active nucleus. It contains a 55 million solar-mass black hole at its heart, with two jets of material that stream away from the galaxy at about half the speed of light across a million light-years of space.

Black holes affect the time

Just as a clock runs a bit slower closer to sea level than up on a space station, clock run really slow near black holes. It all has to do with gravity.

Black holes are actually leftovers of former stars and are so dense that nothing can flee from their dominant gravitational energy.