What do we know about blackholes and what are we yet to know about them?
Black holes are regions in space where an enormous amount of mass is packed into a tiny volume. This creates a gravitational pull so strong that not even light can escape. They are created when giant stars collapse. Black holes fascinate both the public and scientists—they push the limits of our understanding about matter, space and time.
Thus far our knowledge on blackholes are limited, but we do know that black holes do form via two distinct channels. According to the first pathway, they are stellar corpses, so they form when massive stars die. Black holes grow by the accretion of matter nearby that is pulled in by their immense gravity. Hawking predicted that black holes could also radiate away energy and shrink very slowly.
Even as new detectors and telescopes have been able to tell us more and more about black holes in the past decades, scientists still have hundreds of questions about black holes. What happens as stuff falls in? When it falls in, how much comes back out? Does this stuff end up causing the black hole to spin? How are these black holes created in the first place?
One thing that keeps scientists awake at night is whether information that falls into a black hole is truly gone forever. There are other laws of physics that say that all information in the universe is preserved; even if you burn a notebook, its information could theoretically be recovered from the traces and gases that are left behind, as well as the light that was emitted. But as far as we can tell, it’s possible that the information within a notebook dropped into a black hole could be truly erased from the universe.
Hence, future research into blackholes will be crucial to gain a better understanding of our universe.
