9 Misconceptions You Probably Have About Black Holes

Black holes are some of the weirdest, most fascinating things in the universe, but thanks to sci-fi and pop culture, a lot of what people think they know about them isn’t actually true.

Scientists have been studying black holes for decades, and while there’s still plenty we don’t fully understand, we do know that some of the most common ideas about them are way off.

9

Black Holes Are Cosmic Vacuum Cleaners

A lot of people think black holes just roam around space, sucking up everything like some kind of cosmic Roomba. But that’s not how they work. Their gravity isn’t magical. It follows the same rules as any other massive object, like a planet or a star. Things can actually orbit a black hole just fine, as long as they stay at a safe distance.

The real danger zone is the event horizon. Once something crosses that point, there’s no coming back. But unless you’re already far too close, a black hole isn’t going to randomly pull you in. You’d have to drift toward it, just like you would with any other strong gravitational force.

8

Black Holes Are Completely Invisible

Black holes don’t give off light themselves, but that doesn’t mean they’re impossible to see. Instead of looking for the black hole itself, scientists watch how it affects the surrounding matter.

For example, a black hole’s gravity pulls in gas and dust, creating a swirling accretion disk that gets very hot and glows brightly. That’s often the first clue that a black hole is there.

In 2019, astronomers actually managed to photograph a black hole’s “shadow” using the Event Horizon Telescope. It’s not the black hole itself, but the glowing material around it and the way light bends near the event horizon.

7

All Black Holes Are the Same Size

Black holes aren’t one-size-fits-all. They come in different sizes, depending on how they formed. Here’s what we know (or theorize, at least) at the moment:

• Stellar-mass black holes are the “regular” kind, formed when a massive star collapses. They’re a up to a few dozen times the mass of the Sun.
• Intermediate-mass black holes are the middleweights, ranging from hundreds to thousands of solar masses. Scientists are still trying to figure out how they form.
• Supermassive black holes are the monsters lurking at the centers of galaxies, millions or even billions of times the mass of the Sun. Sagittarius A*, the one at the center of our Milky Way, is one of these.
• Primordial black holes are purely theoretical (for now). If they exist, they’d be tiny, maybe even as small as an atom, formed in the early universe.

6

All Stars Become Black Holes

Not every star gets the dramatic black hole ending. Only the biggest ones that are about 20 times the mass of the Sun or more have enough gravity to collapse into a black hole when they die.

Smaller stars, like our Sun, have a much quieter fate. When they run out of fuel, they shed their outer layers and leave behind a white dwarf, a super-dense but not quite black-hole-level core. Slightly bigger stars might collapse into neutron stars, which are insanely dense but still not black holes.

5

You’d Be Instantly Crushed Upon Entering a Black Hole

Falling into a black hole sounds like an instant, brutal death, but it actually depends on the size of the black hole.

In a stellar-mass black hole (the smaller kind), things would go bad fast. Gravity changes so sharply near the event horizon that you’d be stretched into a thin strand (a phenomenon appropriately named spaghettification) long before you even reach the center.

But if you fell into a supermassive black hole like Sagittarius A, the one in the middle of our galaxy, you might not even notice when you crossed the event horizon. The gravitational pull changes more gradually, so you wouldn’t get stretched out right away.

That said, you’d still die.

4

Black Holes Are Permanent

It’s true that once you cross a black hole’s event horizon, there’s no coming back. Not even light can escape. But that doesn’t mean black holes last forever.

Thanks to a weird quantum effect called Hawking radiation (named after Stephen Hawking), black holes slowly lose energy over time. This means they actually shrink incredibly slowly.

Given enough time, like far longer than the current age of the universe, a black hole could completely evaporate. So while nothing escapes from inside, black holes themselves don’t stick around forever.

3

Black Holes Stay in One Place

Black holes aren’t anchored in space. They can move, just like stars and planets, sometimes at intense speeds.

Most black holes stay put, like the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy. But some, called rogue black holes, drift through space. They can get kicked out of their original locations by gravitational tugs from other objects or even from collisions with other black holes.

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2

Black Holes Are Just Holes in Space

Despite the name, black holes aren’t actually holes or empty voids. They’re super-dense objects with a ton of mass and gravity, just like stars or planets, but way more extreme than anything we’re used to.

Black holes form when a massive star collapses in on itself, cramming all its mass into an unbelievably small space. This creates a gravitational pull so strong that nothing can escape past the event horizon. Not even light.

So, a black hole isn’t some cosmic hole. It’s more like a super-packed object that bends space and time in a way that makes it impossible to escape once you get too close.

1

The Large Hadron Collider Could Create a Black Hole That Destroys Earth

Some people worry that the Large Hadron Collider, the world’s most powerful particle accelerator built to smash protons together at nearly the speed of light, might accidentally create a black hole that swallows the planet. But there’s really no danger. This idea is more science fiction than science.

The idea comes from the fact that high-energy particle collisions, like the ones in the LHC, could theoretically produce tiny black holes. But even if that happened (which isn’t certain), these black holes would be microscopic and would disappear almost instantly thanks to Hawking radiation. They wouldn’t stick around long enough to do any damage.

Plus, nature has been running its own version of the LHC for billions of years. Cosmic rays, which are high-energy particles from space, smash into Earth’s atmosphere all the time with way more energy than anything we can create in a lab. If those collisions were dangerous, we wouldn’t be here right now.

While black holes are obviously very real, the idea of a man-made one destroying Earth just doesn’t line up with actual physics… yet.

Black holes do have mind-bending properties, but they’re not what sci-fi makes them out to be. We now have real images of black holes, we know they can move through space, and we even understand how they can slowly evaporate over time.

The reality of black holes is much more fascinating than fiction.