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Imagine, just for a moment, that you are aboard a spaceship equipped with a magical engine capable of accelerating you to any arbitrarily high velocity.
This is absolutely and utterly impossible, but it turns out it’ll be okay, for reasons you’ll see in a second.
Because you know your engine can push you faster than the speed of light, you have no fear of black holes.
It’s basically impossible to give a short, succinct description of black holes that is also in any way even vaguely correct. They are so completely different from anything we encounter in daily life that even metaphors fail.
So the best way to think of it, for the layperson just going about life wanting to be essentially educated as to how the universe works, is to imagine a very large, very old star. This star has used up all its fusion “fuel,” if you will, and will soon collapse, exploding spectacularly in an apocalyptic cataclysm of radiation that will, briefly, outshine its whole galaxy.
Two years after producing the first-ever image of a black hole, an international team of researchers has released an updated view of the magnetic fields surrounding it — a development they say brings them one step closer to understanding the M87 galaxy’s ability to “launch energetic jets from its core.”
Why is it that when you push two pieces of wood together, they don’t smush together and become one smaller piece of wood? Because the atoms that make up the pieces of wood push against each other, repel each other. They want to own their own little bit of space. They resist being smushed.
But they can only push back so hard. With enough force, you *can* smush atoms together, breaking them down into smaller things. Those smaller things also don’t want to be smushed together, but with enough force, they will too. Everything will, with enough force.
