BLACK HOLE - SINGULARITY

 

This thing is like the ultimate trash compactor, except it doesn't make any noise or smell bad. It just crushes everything into nothingness.

They are predicted by Einstein's general theory of relativity, which is the best theory we have to describe gravity.

And according to this theory, every black hole has a singularity at its center.

We don't definitely know for sure about these singularities because we can't see inside a black hole, but we have some very good reasons to believe that they exist.

One of them is the singularity theorem, which was proved by Roger Penrose, who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2020 for his work on black holes.

This thing says that if enough matter and energy are squeezed into a small enough region of spacetime, then a black hole will form and a singularity will be inevitable.

This is what happens when massive stars collapse at the end of their lives, or when two neutron stars or black holes merge.

As you get closer to the singularity, time slows down more and more, until it stops completely at the singularity.

This means that from the outside, it looks like nothing ever reaches the singularity. It just gets frozen at the event horizon, which is the point of no return around the black hole.

But from the inside, it's a different story. If you were unlucky enough to fall into a black hole and not get stretched into oblivion, you would experience time normally until you hit the singularity.

And then... well, nobody knows what happens then. Maybe you would cease to exist, or maybe you would enter another universe, or maybe something else entirely.

The problem is that general relativity breaks down at the singularity, so we need a new theory of quantum gravity to describe what happens there.