Black Hole Facts for Kids

18 Black Hole Facts For Kids

1. Black holes are astronomical objects that have an enormous amount of mass in a small region of spacetime.
2. A black hole’s gravitational force is so strong nothing can escape it, not even light (electromagnetic radiation).
3. Once anything crosses the event horizon of a black hole nothing can escape its gravitational force.
4. All the matter, including light, that passes the event horizon of a black hole is compressed down into a single point in the center called the singularity.
5. English natural professor John Michell was the first person to theorize about black holes in 1783.
6. German-born theoretical physicist Albert Einstein predicted the existence of black holes in 1915 when he developed his theory of general relativity.
7. American theoretical physicist John Wheeler was the first person to popularize the name black hole in 1967 after one of his students suggested the name.
8. The first black hole to be discovered was Cygnus X-1 in 1964 during a rocket test by the United States Army.
9. You cannot see a black hole; we can only see how a black hole affects space and objects around it.
10. The first picture of a black hole was taken in April 2017, it was a picture of the supermassive black hole called M87* at the center of the Messier 87 galaxy.
11. There are three types of black holes: stellar-mass black holes, intermediate black holes, and supermassive black holes.
12. Stellar-mass black holes are created from the collapse and explosion of a massive star.
13. The nearest stellar-mass black hole to Earth is in the Gaia BH1 binary system around 1,560 light-years away.
14. Intermediate black holes are theoretical and are believed to occur with the collision of two stellar-mass black holes.
15. One of the candidates for a intermediate black hole is HLX-1 in the ESO 243-49 galaxy around 290 million light-years away.
16. Supermassive black holes are giants that are found in the galactic center of a galaxy.
17. The nearest supermassive black hole to Earth is Sagittarius A* at the center of the Milky Way galaxy around 26,673 light-years away.
18. There is a potentially a fourth type of black holes, the primordial black hole, which would have existed in the early days of our Universe.

Black Hole Pictures

Pictures are one of the best ways for people to learning about something. That is why we are providing you with the below images to help you with your research on black holes. Below you will find three pictures that represent black holes. These pictures should help you better understand black holes and what they look like.

A picture of a black hole eating a star.

A picture of a black hole in deep space.

A picture of the event horizon of a black hole.