First Stop - Outside the Black HoleThis is a black hole. We've chosen a rather large one for this tour (it's a few billion times the mass of our sun) because the properties of large black holes are a little easier to observe than those of small black holes. What you're seeing now is the accretion disk of the black hole - in other words, all the stuff that's caught up in its gravitational field. It's orbiting the black hole very quickly... but out here, we can orbit just as if we were orbiting a star, like Earth orbits our Sun. |
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