{"id":786539,"date":"2024-07-30T02:26:52","date_gmt":"2024-07-30T07:26:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/?p=786539"},"modified":"2024-07-30T02:26:52","modified_gmt":"2024-07-30T07:26:52","slug":"demystifying-the-origins-of-supermassive-black-holes-short-wave-npr","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/?p=786539","title":{"rendered":"Demystifying the origins of supermassive black holes : Short Wave : NPR"},"content":{"rendered":"


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\n This illustration depicts a supermassive black hole consuming the matter around it.
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NASA\/Aurore Simonnet (Sonoma State Univ.)<\/p>\n

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NASA\/Aurore Simonnet (Sonoma State Univ.)<\/p>\n

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This illustration depicts a supermassive black hole consuming the matter around it.<\/p>\n

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NASA\/Aurore Simonnet (Sonoma State Univ.)<\/p>\n

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Black holes are one of the most mysterious cosmological phenomena out there. <\/p>\n

Priya Natarajan calls them, “the point where all known laws of physics break down.” She’s an astrophysicist at Yale University.<\/p>\n

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. <\/p>\n

Normal stuff. <\/p>\n

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 <\/em>in the fabric of spacetime itself?<\/p>\n