wow this is pretty contradicting lol...some of you say there are black holes..some say to far...some say dont exist? hmmmm

Black holes exist.. you can thank hubble for the pictures to prove it and the physicists that predicted and explained it. There behavior is the only gray area.. we can only assume.. but we know they are there. Quite the opposite from the quantum world eh.. maybe i just found the beginning of a theory of everything haha

I heard a theory that there is an enormous black hole at the center of our galaxy and that is why it appears to be "rotating". Also, what happens to all the mass sucked in by a black hole? Does it just dissappear or does the black hole get bigger?
If it were to get bigger wouldn't all the mass in the universe eventually be sucked in by black holes?

A black hole "shines" with Hawking radiation (thermal radiation thought to be emitted by black holes due to quantum effects) or (luminosity of the black hole). “The escaping member of a virtual particle pair carried away energy from the black hole, and the black hole loses mass as a result. Eventually the black hole loses all its energy, or equivalently mass, and evaporates”

The formula for calculating the lifetime of a black hole tells us that the lifetime of a black hole is proportional to the cube of its mass. That means a massive black hole takes proportionally much longer time to evaporate, and the process of evaporation accelerates as the black hole slowly loses its mass. So as the black hole loses its mass, its temperature increases. When a black hole gets very very small, its temperature may become so high that it may burn up and cause an explosion! Therefore black holes do not last forever so I don’t think all the mass in the universe will eventually be sucked in by black holes

But if there any numerous black holes and they all explode then wouldnt that leave our universe changed
some how.

i thought nothing could 'escape' a black hole

but it does make sense that they wouldn't live forever. if they did, then they would all gobble eachother up! the effects of the black holes blowing up or being created probably does not cause much to change on earth simply because the ones that are blowing up are really far away from us. its field of influence wouldn't be very strong say 100000 light years away from it. on the other hand, i was wathcing the discovery channel and apparently there are these ancient caves with pictographs that tell of a time that the sky lit up so bright that there was no night. scientists today believe that the light was caused by a star expanding out and collapsing on itself and then eventually for ming a black hole

If you sent a camera into a black hole, wouldn't it get 'swallowed up' or it dodges that point of singularity and emerges on the other side...so either way, we would have no way of retrieving it!

if black holes can "swallow" very large masses then where does this mass go. because accoriding to the law of conservation of energy "energy cannot be created nor destroyed, just transfered" so if a planet is sucked up by a black hole then just where does it go? another place in the universe? or if a star is ripped apart by a black hole what happens to all of the energy of the star?

oo! i just read this. what physicists and astronomers believe happens is that if the black hole isn't spinning and the planet or whatnot hits the point of singularity the matter will be compressed so much until it is zero volume. if the matter dodges the point of singularity the black hole creates a worm hole that will dump all the matter it swallows up into another time and place. and there are there are these things called quasars in space that they believe are the opposite as black holes. they are sources of unbelievable energy and light and have therefore been thought to be the other end of a black hole.

That is so scary. I would not want to get caught in that thing! What do you think it is like on the other end of the black hole?? I would not be a happy camper if I was spat out at another place and time. Do you think it would be possible to live in that new place and time? Or would you just die?