{"id":108525,"date":"2020-06-10T22:05:01","date_gmt":"2020-06-11T05:05:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2020\/06\/what-is-a-black-hole"},"modified":"2020-06-10T22:05:01","modified_gmt":"2020-06-11T05:05:01","slug":"what-is-a-black-hole","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2020\/06\/what-is-a-black-hole","title":{"rendered":"What is a black hole?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/what-is-a-black-hole.gif\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Black holes are the dark remnants of collapsed stars, regions of space cut off from the rest of the universe. If something falls into a <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nbcnews.com\/mach\/video\/black-holes-explained-1111694915623\" target=\"_blank\">black hole<\/a>, it can never come back out. Not even light can escape, meaning black holes are invisible even with powerful telescopes. Yet physicists know black holes exist because they\u2019re consistent with time-tested theories, and because astronomers have <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nbcnews.com\/mach\/science\/why-black-hole-simulation-may-be-best-ever-ncna939181\" target=\"_blank\">observed how matter behaves just outside a black hole<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Naturally, science fiction loves such an enigmatic entity. Black holes have played starring roles in popular books, movies and television shows, from \u201cStar Trek\u201d and \u201cDoctor Who\u201d to the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nbcnews.com\/science\/space\/science-interstellar-look-beyond-wormhole-n241441\" target=\"_blank\">2014 blockbuster \u201cInterstellar.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n<p>But black holes aren\u2019t quite as menacing as they are commonly portrayed. \u201cThey definitely do not suck,\u201d says Daryl Haggard, an astrophysicist at McGill University in Montreal. \u201cA black hole just sits there, passively. Things can fall onto it, just as meteors can fall to Earth, but it doesn\u2019t pull stuff in.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Black holes are the dark remnants of collapsed stars, regions of space cut off from the rest of the universe. If something falls into a black hole, it can never come back out. Not even light can escape, meaning black holes are invisible even with powerful telescopes. Yet physicists know black holes exist because they\u2019re [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":396,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33,1509,219],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-108525","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cosmology","category-entertainment","category-physics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/108525","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/396"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=108525"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/108525\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=108525"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=108525"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=108525"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}