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

    Asked by anon-200933 to Rosemary, Oliver, Leigh, Jordan, Hannah, David on 9 Mar 2019.
    • Photo: David Walker-Sünderhauf

      David Walker-Sünderhauf answered on 9 Mar 2019: last edited 9 Mar 2019 9:49 am

      The spot in the middle of a black hole is called a Singularity, and because it has so much mass concentrated into a single spot, it’s density becomes infinite o as far as I know physicists don’t really know how to explain it according to the normal rules of physics – apparently space-time might break down in this spot, who knows what could happen there! (i certainly don’t 😛 maybe a physicist would know more!)

    • Photo: Oliver Gordon

      Oliver Gordon answered on 13 Mar 2019:

      Love this question. I believe the most correct answer is our laws of physics no longer apply, so things can get quite complicated in terms of what is ACTUALLY there (Stephen Hawking’s last work before he died was on this topic).
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      David is right – the bottom of a black hole (at least using conventional maths) is a single point. Think you making a point on a piece of paper with your pencil. Except it’s smaller than that, it’s smaller than an atom, or anything that makes up an atom. It’s so small it has no size that no number can describe. It has infinite mass (which I’m not sure about myself – surely it would have the mass of everything the black hole has fed on?). The problem is that although we know there’s stuff in there, by the laws of what a black hole are we can’t see into it, and all of our maths stops working.
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      Then you have some theories that black holes could be portals to other dimensions, etc.

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