Cosmic mystery

A journey into black holes

- Dr. Sandip Kakade

Imagine a monster lurking in the vast darkness of space. This isn’t a creature with teeth and claws, but something far more powerful. It’s an object so strange and so strong that it can swallow entire stars and even trap light, the fastest thing in the entire universe. This isn’t science fiction; this is a black hole, and it’s one of the most fascinating and mysterious things astronomers have ever discovered.

But what exactly is a black hole? Where do they come from? And what makes them so weird? Let’s take a journey to the edge of reality and find out.

What is a black hole

To understand a black hole, we first need to understand gravity. Gravity is the invisible force that pulls things together. It’s the force that keeps you on the ground, and it’s the force that keeps the Moon orbiting the Earth and the Earth orbiting the Sun.

Everything that has ‘stuff’ (or mass) has gravity. The more ‘stuff’ you have, the stronger your gravity. The Sun is huge, so it has much stronger gravity than Earth. Now, imagine you could take something massive, like our Sun, and squeeze it. I mean really squeeze it—squash it down until it’s smaller than a city, then smaller than a house, then smaller than a marble. All that ‘stuff’ is now packed into a tiny, tiny space. Its gravity would become incredibly, unbelievably strong.