• Question: What's at the bottom of a black hole?

    Asked by Andrea Echeverria to LauraAnne, Katy, Helen, Dan, Andrew on 17 Nov 2016.
    • Photo: LauraAnne Furlong

      LauraAnne Furlong answered on 17 Nov 2016:

      Black holes are the remains of giant stars who have collapsed inwards on themselves, and the gravity is so strong even light can’t escape beyond its surface. This is very much outside my sport science knowledge zone, but my understanding of them is that black holes don’t have a ‘bottom’ as such, they are three dimensional objects so they have a centre rather than a bottom, a bit like the earth. We don’t really know what happens in them but theoretical physicists can make predictions about what they think happens in them.

    • Photo: Katy Griggs

      Katy Griggs answered on 17 Nov 2016:

      Because no light can get out, people can’t see black holes. They are invisible. Space telescopes with special tools can help find black holes. They range in size from the size of one atom to supermassive black holes, which some scientists believe are in the centre of every large galaxy. For somebody standing outside a black hole, nothing ever passes through, so in that sense, all of the mass of a black hole is present right on the surface and there is no bottom.

Comments