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These are the seven biggest myths about black holes busted by science. Myth one, black holes are huge. Now, most black holes are pretty big. Super massive black holes have diameters in the region of tens of millions of kilome, but some black holes are much smaller. In fact, astronomers have found one black hole that may only be 19 km across. That's only about a quarter of the width of London. Myth two, black holes eat things. Despite their reputation for being all consuming space monsters, black holes don't actually search out stars and planets to eat. Instead, it's better to think of black holes as more
like areas of spaceime where the gravity is incredibly strong. And if an object is near enough to a black hole, it will be pulled in by that gravity. Myth three, anything near a black hole is doomed. A black hole's gravity is incredibly strong, but it's really no different to any other type of gravity. If you were to swap a black hole with a planet of the same mass, nearby objects will act exactly the same. Many planets even orbit black holes. And some scientists believe life could even exist on these worlds. Myth four, you can't see a black hole. It's true that once light passes a black hole's event horizon, it never
escapes. But there are still ways to spot a black hole, like observing how stars move around it. That's how scientists spotted Sagittarius a star, the super massive black hole at the very heart of our galaxy, 26,000 light years away. Our only photo of it may be quite fuzzy, but this image took a lot of data to produce. About 3.5 pabytes worth, the equivalent of a 100 million Tik Tok videos. For more black hole myths, make sure to stick around for part two.
