Imagine, somewhere in the galaxy, the corpse of a star so dense that it punctures the fabric of space and time. So dense that it devours any surrounding matter that gets too close, pulling it into a riptide of gravity that nothing, not even light, can escape.
And once matter crosses over the point of no return, the event horizon, it spirals helplessly toward an almost infinitely small point, a point where spacetime is so curved that all our theories break down: the singularity. No one gets out alive.
Black holes sound too strange to be real. But they are actually pretty common in space. There are dozens known and probably millions more in the Milky Way and a billion times that lurking outside. Scientists also believe there could be a supermassive black hole at the center of nearly every galaxy, including our own. The makings and dynamics of these monstrous warpings of spacetime have been confounding scientists for centuries.
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