1/ Today is #BlackHoleFriday, an annual science outreach event that, by complete coincidence I’m sure, is done on #BlackFriday. You’ll read lots of cool stuff about black holes on the hashtag. Here’s mine.
2/ Black holes are weird. Duh. People like to think of them as something like incredibly dense nuggets of stuff that sucks other stuff in. But they’re not like that.
3/ If you squeeze enough mass into a small enough volume, the gravity gets so intense that it’s impossible to escape them *if you get too close*. From far away, though, gravitationally they more or less act like anything with that much mass.
4/ So if the Sun turns into a black hole we wouldn’t get drawn in. In fact, we’d orbit it almost exactly the same way as we do now, though we’d freeze to death pretty rapidly, which, in the end, would still kinda suck.
5/ Black holes get weird *when you get close*. Anything with mass warps space — we feel that warp as gravity! — but black holes stretch space to its limit.
