The curious case of the supermassive black hole

Black holes are one of the most mysterious cosmological phenomena out there.

Priya Natarajan calls them, "the point where all known laws of physics break down." She's an astrophysicist at Yale University.

To understand black holes and why they're confusing, it's probably easiest to go back to Albert Einstein's musings on them and the wider universe. Einstein described the universe as a 4D fabric fusing space and time together. That fabric is dotted with planets and other kinds of matter, which can bend that fabric.

Normal stuff.

But what happens if you push that bendy thought experiment to its limits? What happens when an object's mass is so compact that the pothole becomes a puncture in the fabric of spacetime itself?

Well, then you get a black hole.

These potholes can make some pretty weird stuff happen.

If, for example, you happened to fall into a stellar mass black hole, you might experience something scientists like Natarajan call spaghettification. (Yes, that's the scientific term). You'd be stretched and compressed; time would also be also stretched, drastically slowing down as you fell.

But for a long time, scientists still didn't know how supermassive black holes were created. That story was only confirmed within the last year.

Natarajan says this understanding of black holes is crucial to our understanding of the structure of the entire universe.

"I think now it is impossible to come up with a deep and clear understanding of how our universe is structured, how the galaxies formed and grew and evolved over cosmic time without taking black holes into account," she says.

Check out more of our series Space Camp on the weird and mysterious in space at npr.org/spacecamp.

Interested in more space science? Email us at shortwave@npr.org.

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Today's episode was produced by Hannah Chinn and Rachel Carlson. Emily Kwong, Regina Barber and Hannah checked the facts. Maggie Luthar and Gilly Moon were the audio engineers.

Special thanks to our friends at the U.S. Space & Rocket Center, Home of Space Camp®.