Exploring the counterintuitive mysteries of black holes with Paul Sutter

Produced and directed by Corey Eisenstein. Click here for transcript. (video link)

Of all the amazing and varied phenomena in the cosmological zoo, black holes are among the most mysterious. They are zombies—the all-devouring corpses of dead stars, made of trillions of tons of stellar ash compressed into an infinitely dense point called a "singularity." The gravity exerted by the singularity is so intense that it warps space-time, preventing even light from escaping.

In many ways, to look at a black hole is to look at the future of our Universe because there will come a time—many trillions of trillions of years from now, but inevitable nonetheless—where all the sky's stars will have gone out, and black holes will be the Universe's main attraction, still gobbling down any remaining free clumps of matter and acting as the only sources of light left. And perhaps most creepily of all, if proton decay turns out to be a thing, this future black hole era will be how our cosmos spends the majority of its life—dark, silent, and forbiddingly empty.