But don't expect a black hole to disappear any time soon. It takes a shockingly long time for a black hole to shed all of its mass as energy via Hawking radiation. It would take 10100 years, or a googol, for a supermassive black hole to fully disappear.
Since nothing can escape from the gravitational force of a black hole, it was long thought that black holes are impossible to destroy. But we now know that black holes actually evaporate, slowly returning their energy to the Universe.
New black hole simulations that incorporate quantum gravity indicate that when a black hole dies, it produces a gravitational shock wave that radiates information, a finding that could solve the information paradox. Perhaps the most enigmatic objects in the Universe, black holes embody many unsolved paradoxes.
For all practical purposes the matter has disappeared from the universe. Once inside the black hole's event horizon, matter will be torn apart into its smallest subatomic components and eventually be squeezed into the singularity.
The possibility that a black hole could actually impact Earth may seem straight out of science fiction, but the reality is that microscopic primordial black holes could actually hit Earth. If one did, it wouldn't just impact like an asteroid, it'd pass straight through the entire Earth and exit the other side.
By their calculations, quantum mechanics could feasibly turn the event horizon into a giant wall of fire and anything coming into contact would burn in an instant. In that sense, black holes lead nowhere because nothing could ever get inside. This, however, violates Einstein's general theory of relativity.
At the center of a black hole the gravity is so strong that, according to general relativity, space-time becomes so extremely curved that ultimately the curvature becomes infinite. This results in space-time having a jagged edge, beyond which physics no longer exists -- the singularity.
Fortunately, this has never happened to anyone — black holes are too far away to pull in any matter from our solar system.
Like part of a cosmic Russian doll, our universe may be nested inside a black hole that is itself part of a larger universe. In turn, all the black holes found so far in our universe—from the microscopic to the supermassive—may be doorways into alternate realities.
Over time they shrink down to nothing and simply pop away in a flash of energy. It's not exactly fast. A good size black hole — say, a few times more massive than the sun — will take about 10^100 years to eventually evaporate through this process, known as Hawking Radiation.
In about 100 trillion years, the last light will go out. The bad news is that the universe is going to die a slow, aching, miserable death. The good news is that we won't be around to see it.
The trite answer is that both space and time were created at the big bang about 14 billion years ago, so there is nothing beyond the universe. However, much of the universe exists beyond the observable universe, which is maybe about 90 billion light years across.
The overwhelming majority of the Universe will not be consumed by black holes, but rather flung into intergalactic space. Once there, they will wander the Universe as “runaway stars” (or stellar remnants) for as long as the Universe still exists.
A new model suggests how gravitational waves created by the collision between black holes spread and interact within the fabric of space-time. When black holes collide and merge to form even more massive black holes, this violent process sends ripples surging through the very fabric of space.
According to Einstein's general theory of relativity, the gravity of a black hole is so intense that nothing can escape it.
"Black holes do not go around in space eating stars, moons and planets. Earth will not fall into a black hole because no black hole is close enough to the solar system for Earth to do that," NASA noted in 2018, adding that the sun isn't big enough to become a black hole.
The world as we know it has three dimensions of space—length, width and depth—and one dimension of time. But there's the mind-bending possibility that many more dimensions exist out there. According to string theory, one of the leading physics model of the last half century, the universe operates with 10 dimensions.
Because space isn't curved they will never meet or drift away from each other. A flat universe could be infinite: imagine a 2D piece of paper that stretches out forever. But it could also be finite: imagine taking a piece of paper, making a cylinder and joining the ends to make a torus (doughnut) shape.
There are no classes of object in our Universe more extreme than black holes. With so much mass present in such a tiny volume of space, they create a region around them where the curvature of space is so strong that nothing — not even light — can escape from its gravity once a certain boundary is crossed.
While researchers have never found a wormhole in our universe, scientists often see wormholes described in the solutions to important physics equations. Most prominently, the solutions to the equations behind Einstein's theory of space-time and general relativity include wormholes.
The singularity at the center of a black hole is the ultimate no man's land: a place where matter is compressed down to an infinitely tiny point, and all conceptions of time and space completely break down. And it doesn't really exist. Something has to replace the singularity, but we're not exactly sure what.
The black hole in the triple system HR 6819 is just 1000 light-years from Earth. The Milky Way Galaxy is thought to contain hundreds of millions of black holes. But only a few dozen have revealed themselves—through the x-ray glow of hot gases that surround them.
A black hole is born when an object becomes unable to withstand the compressing force of its own gravity. Many objects (including our Earth and Sun) will never become black holes. Their gravity is not sufficient to overpower the atomic and nuclear forces of their interiors, which resist compression.