Black holes are pretty scary when you ponder them. They seem nihilistic, infinitely destructive on an inconceivable scale, notwithstanding the ideas of Hawking radiation.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
A black hole really is an object with very rich structure, just like Earth has a rich structure of mountains, valleys, oceans, and so forth. Its warped space whirls around the central singularity like air in a tornado.
Black holes destroy any objects that happen to fall victim to their gravitational pull.
Black holes provide theoreticians with an important theoretical laboratory to test ideas. Conditions within a black hole are so extreme, that by analyzing aspects of black holes we see space and time in an exotic environment, one that has shed important, and sometimes perplexing, new light on their fundamental nature.
An ordinary black hole is thought to be the end state of a really massive star's life.
A big misconception is that a black hole is made of matter that has just been compacted to a very small size. That's not true. A black hole is made from warped space and time.
Black holes can bang against space-time as mallets on a drum and have a very characteristic song.
It is hard to think of practical applications of the black hole. Because practical applications are so remote, many people assume we should not be interested. But this quest to understand the world is what defines us as human beings.
In my third novel there is an actual black hole that swallows everything you love.
The black holes of nature are the most perfect macroscopic objects there are in the universe: the only elements in their construction are our concepts of space and time.
As an astronomer, I get to ignore the details of the things that we don't understand. There's a lot of work that we can do on scales that we do understand, and there is actually a finite size that I can associate with a super massive black hole.