• Question: What's at the centre of a black hole?

    Asked by to Edward, Ian, Mathew, Naomi on 24 Jun 2014. This question was also asked by .
    • Photo: Edward Hughes

      Edward Hughes answered on 24 Jun 2014:

      Nobody really knows. When black holes were first proposed, people thought they had a singularity in the middle where you fall off the edge of the universe. But nowadays people don’t really believe that. It’s a bit like when people thought the Earth was flat and you could fall off the edge of it. Nobody thinks that now!

      So what theories are there? Well some people think a black hole is a “fuzzball” of tangled up strings. This would solve the singularity problem, because there would never just be one special point in the middle where things fell out. Famously Hawking discovered that black holes burn up over time, so maybe this fuzzball just stores everything that’s fallen in until it all burns off eventually.

      Keep thinking about black holes – they’re amazing!

    • Photo: Naomi Osborne

      Naomi Osborne answered on 25 Jun 2014:

      And we’ll probably never know what’s in the centre as not even light escapes being sucked in!

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