In science fiction, black holes are often a part of the story. They are scary, strange, and fascinating. Here are the seven most common Myths Regarding Black Holes and why they are untrue.

Black holes eat things.

Even while black holes are often likened to the Very Hungry Caterpillar, they do not travel in search of stars and planets to eat, and They will not be hungry if they run out of food in the vicinity. It makes more sense to conceive of a black hole as a region of spacetime with very intense gravity rather than as a monster that devours everything in its path.

If a star is next to a black hole, its gravity will pull it in, and the star may be pulled in so far that it can't get out. But the black hole does not require what it eats to live; nothing bad will happen if it runs out of things to eat.

Huge black holes

Some black holes are big. Supermassive black holes have sizes of tens of millions of kilometers. But that's not always true. Some black holes are a lot, a lot smaller than others. Stellar-mass black holes can be very small, even though they have the same mass as our Sun. Astronomers thought they found a 19-kilometer-wide black hole in 2019.

Anything that comes near to a black hole will be pulled in.

A black hole has very strong gravity, but other than that; it is just like any other gravity. A star with ten times the Sun's mass has the same gravitational force as a black hole with 10 times the Sun's mass. So, an object near a black hole will act just like it would if the black hole were an object with the same mass. You can go around a black hole. Some experts also think that planets that orbit black holes could have life.

A black hole isn't seen.

Light can never leave the event horizon, also known as the "point of no return." This is because gravity is so strong that the speed something must travel to get away, called its "escape velocity," is higher than the speed of light. But you can find one in more than one way.

Watching how the stars around it move is one way to tell. In 2002, scientists tracked how a star named S2 moved around the object in the center of the Milky Way. The star was circling something invisible, which scientists now name the supermassive black hole Scorpio A.

In 2019, the Event Horizon Telescope got a picture of M87. This gave scientists a better look at a black hole. M87 is a supermassive black hole surrounded by a big disc of stars, gas, and other things spiraling toward the center. The name for this disc is "accretion disc."

Friction warms this substance while it spins at practically the speed of light, emitting electromagnetic radiation. EHT took an important picture of this accretion disc by combining telescopes all over the Earth to create one planet-sized camera.

Spacetime gaps are black holes.

A black hole is like a hole that holds whatever goes into it. But it's not a "hole" in spacetime. But the rules of physics begin to get more difficult there. What happens inside a black hole? Well, there's no way for us to know. Even light can't get out, so we can't see inside. But some scientists think that black holes might be "wormholes" that lead to different parts of the Universe.

Black holes are always in the same place.

People often consider a black hole a set point in spacetime that pulls in and destroys all nearby matter. But that's not right. Like stars, planets, and everything elsewhere in the Universe, black holes also move around. In 2015, two black holes collided and joined, making the first gravity waves ever seen. The two went within each other and got closer until they finally collided.

You would die if a black hole swallowed you.

Black holes constitute the densest objects in the universe, and if you fell into one, you would die quickly from the crushing pressure. That wouldn't kill you, though. The result that would murder you is spaghettification, which is exactly what it sounds like. Imagine you are falling feet first into a black hole.

The force of gravity increases as you go closer to a thing, but with a black hole, the differential is so vast that the force on your feet is considerably higher than on your head. That means your feet would move toward the center of the black hole much faster than your head, and you would be spread out like spaghetti. Your whole body would be ripped apart.