• Question: What is on the other side of a black hole

    Asked by Winnie to Connor, Jillian, Lidunka, Sarah, Steven on 16 Jun 2015. This question was also asked by Izzy Buckland, Jaitanium_Rouse, Sanchi, Charles, Alex, Olive.
    • Photo: Connor Macrae

      Connor Macrae answered on 16 Jun 2015:

      We simply don’t know! With a black hole, the problem is that as a certain distance from the center, gravity becomes so strong that not even light can escape it’s pull. This is important as it means their is no way of seeing into a black hole, so no way of observing what is inside. Our best theories are that all the matter inside is piled up into a singularity, an infinitely dense point. But to understand how this singularity works, we need to combine our understanding of gravity and quantum mechanics – to produce a theory of quantum gravity (gravity at very small scales). This is the point scientist are currently at, trying to develop this quantum gravity theory.

    • Photo: Jillian Scudder

      Jillian Scudder answered on 23 Jun 2015:

      Well, there’s two answers to this question; one is that black holes are just spherical objects hanging in space, so the other side is simply more space! Often we show diagrams of space as a 2D space warped into a 3rd direction, but it’s important to remember that that’s a simplification – black holes are extremely spherical!

      If you mean what’s -inside- a black hole, then the answer is that we don’t know – it’s a hyperdense region of space, and presumably, at the center it’s infinitely dense and exists as a singularity, but what happens at the singularity is a mystery!

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