I should also mention that a lot of what I’m talking about below comes from Kip Thorne’s book on the Science of Interstellar and the papers that were published about visualizing Gargantua and the wormhole by James et al. Matter within the accretion disk is violently heated by immense tidal forces, causing many accretion disks to glow brightly.

This line of reasoning doesn't just apply to Earth-mass black holes, but all black holes in the Universe. We do know that galaxies merge and when galaxies merge, they're supermassive black holes or, maybe, weren't supermassive, but pretty massive, and they merge and become supermassive," Gorjian said. If we were to replace Earth with a denser version, up to and including a singularity, the spacetime deformation shown here would be identical; only inside the Earth itself would a difference be notable. Interstellar has lots of fun with that, as does Stargate SG 1’s “A Matter of Time” (I particularly appreciate the violations of the laws of physics in the latter, to the confusion of the military scientist character: “from everything I think I know about General Relativity, that can’t happen!

American announced it would investigate to determine whether the message violated the university’s code of conduct and if the student should be punished. It's a pretty straightforward exercise in both Newton's and Einstein's gravity to show that this is the case, and it agrees thoroughly with what we observe as far as spaceborne objects hitting or missing the Earth. So, before I delve into the world of black holes in popular culture, I’m going to digress a little into Black Holes 101.

By time either of these options reach the event horizon of the black hole itself, they're many, many times the size of the black hole's event horizon. While black holes don't eat up everything in their orbit, objects do fall into black holes if the circumstances are right. Traditional models of TDEs suggest that half of this spaghettified stellar material gets flung outward, away from the black hole, Cendes added. But if we don't find them, then at some point it's like, ‘Why is it that we just sort of separate out into these two larger categories?An example of such a system is Cygnus X-1, in which a blue supergiant star with a mass around 25 times that of the sun orbits a compact object with a mass 8 to 10 times that of the sun — believed to be a stellar-mass black hole (the smallest type of black hole that astronomers have observed).