Unlike all the other objects you’re used to, where they appear to get visually larger in proportion to the distance you are away from them, this black hole appears to grow much more quickly than you were expecting, thanks to the incredible curvature of space.įrom our perspective on Earth, the black hole in the galactic center will appear tiny, with its radius measured in micro-arc-seconds. Ute Kraus, Physics education group Kraus, Universitat Hildesheim a black hole will be bent around it, leaving a large disk of darkness, corresponding to the black hole's event horizon. Owing to the power of General Relativity to stretch and distort space, the light coming from behind. (Hence the “black” in the moniker “black holes.”) But if you looked with your eyes, instead of a gas cloud, star or neutron star, there would be a completely black sphere in the center, from which no light will be visible. Spacetime may be curved, but all you can tell at your distant location is that it’s due to the presence of a mass, not what the properties or distributions of that mass are. In fact, when you’re very far away from a black hole, its gravity is indistinguishable from any other mass, whether it’s a neutron star, a regular star, or just a diffuse cloud of gas. When you’re very far away from a black hole, the fabric of space is less curved. While normal masses curve this spacetime significantly, only black holes will actually curve it an infinite amount at the point(s) where a singularity exists. general relativity, we're up to the challenge. The fabric of the Universe, spacetime, is a tricky concept to understand.

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