You’ve definitely heard of Black Hole – you know they’re a dark, powerful enigma of deep space, but do you actually know what they are and how they work?

Black holes are places in space where the gravity is so immensely strong, due to the massive amount of matter squeezed into them relative to their size, that nothing can escape its pull.

Not planets, not stars, and not even electromagnetic radiation such as light.

Because no light can escape, black holes cannot be seen – they are invisible, appearing black against the background of space.

The only way scientists know of their existence is by using specialized telescopes to observe the behavior of stars and gas surrounding them, and how their behavior changes as their distance from the black hole vary.

There are indeed a few types of black holes – the smallest are as minuscule as just one atom however, they contain the mass of a large mountain.

Putting that into perspective: a droplet of water contains  2,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (two sextillions) atoms of oxygen, and twice that many of hydrogen.

Imagine that number of large mountains squashed into the size of a droplet of water… that’s dense!

There are also “stellar” black holes, which are much larger, and form when the center of very big stars die and collapse in on themselves.

The largest black holes are referred to as “supermassive”, and their cool name is definitely deserved.

These black holes have masses that are equal to more than a million of our sun put together and are found at the center of galaxies.

Legendary scientist 

Albert Einstein  determined that gravity, if strong enough, can warp space and time as we know it and cause it to curve.

Therefore, if an object is dense enough (think of all the mountains in the single water droplet!), it can literally curve in on itself and burrow a hole right into the fabric of space.

The deeper you go into the burrow, the more warped and mangled it gets until you reach the “singularity”.

This is the point where the curving of space and time becomes infinite; space and time as concepts become meaningless, and the laws of physics, which rely on space and time to be constant, no longer apply.

So, if someone were to go into a black hole, reality would sort of… split.