Julia

Black Holes Black holes are objects in space with a gravitational pull so strong that that space gets cut off from the rest of the universe. Nothing can ever escape once in it, not even light. Black holes are invisible. The only time they can be seen at all is when they interact with things, like sucking in gas from an orbiting star. That makes it heat up somehow, creating light, x-rays and gamma rays, making the black hole vaguely visible. Black holes are formed when an aging star collapses onto itself. There are four sizes of black holes: super massive, stellar-mass, intermediate-mass and micro. Super massive black holes contain millions to billions of times the mass of the sun. They are usually in the middle of a galaxy. The absolute smallest mass a black hole can be is 1.5- 3 times the mass of the sun. Black holes got their name because they are, in fact, holes that are black.

There are many myths about black holes, usually supported by Hollywood. One is that black holes are like "vacuums" in space, and that they suck up anything and everything in sight. I believe that that's completely made up. There are pictures of black holes, so people or objects were obviously close enough to see it, and they wern't sucked in. Also, black holes have a horizon (a region you can't escape), and unless you go into the horizon, you won't get sucked in. You can usually see the horizon anyway. If black holes really were like vacuum cleaners, most likely every thing in space would be sucked in.

Another myth is that black holes are like worm holes, but worm holes are most likely just science fiction. Worm holes are believed to be an opening in space used to travel to far away places very quickly. Seeing how some writers of Star trek or something created that idea to put that into a show, it's really unlikely to be real. I believe it's just another Hollywood myth.

No one for sure knows about black holes. It's like a mystery in space, what we currently believe is mainly from Einstein’s theory. For more information on black holes, go to one of these websites: http://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/science/know_l2/black_holes.html

http://cosmology.berkeley.edu/Education/BHfaq.html

http://www.space.com/blackholes/