Introduction

Black holes are incredibly massive objects in space. Nothing escapes its immense attraction, not even fast moving light particles. Since light cannot reveal its inner content, no one knows what's inside the beasts. A black hole affects all matter within its radius of attraction.

Black holes cannot be directly observed. We can merely look for distortions in space, odd behaving stars, and other objects. Gas drawn into the black hole's core will be heated up to extremely high temperatures, resulting in the emission of radiation. Satellites sensitive to this radiation are able to detect these emissions.

Once inside a boundary called the event horizon, return is impossible. A one-way ticket to darkness, if you will. Light emitted from inside the event horizon will never reach an outside observer. Some theories state that inside this region you need an amount of speed greater than the speed of light to outpace the black hole's escape velocity.

A bit of history..

The idea of black holes is not a new one. More than two centuries ago an English gentleman named John Michell came up with the idea of black holes, or what we now call black holes.

Michell was working on a theory to measure the mass of a star, and the relationship between escape velocity and an object's gravitational pull on the projectile trying to break loose..

What he found was that to escape from a body 500 times the size of our Sun (same average density) would require a speed exceeding the speed of light.

An object with an escape velocity higher than the speed of light would therefore be invisible to the naked eye. His peers were not impressed, it took many more years for the idea to become accepted.