A black hole is not a hole. It is gravity taken to its logical conclusion — a region where escape would require moving faster than light, and nothing does. Move your cursor. You are orbiting one.
BEGIN DESCENT ↓Each region below is ordered by its distance from the center, measured in Schwarzschild radii (rs) — the radius of the point of no return itself.
Infalling gas, shredded and spun into a flat ring, heated by friction to millions of degrees. The glow you see in the hero isn't the black hole — it's matter screaming on the way in.
The altitude at which light itself falls into orbit. A photon here can circle the black hole forever — in principle, you could see the back of your own head.
Not a surface — a one-way boundary in spacetime. Cross it and every possible future path points inward. To a distant observer, you simply fade and freeze, redshifted into darkness.
Where general relativity stops returning answers: density and curvature diverge to infinity. Most physicists read this not as reality, but as the signature of a theory beyond Einstein's.
Black holes spent a century as mathematics. Then we heard two of them collide, and three years later we took one's picture.
Serving on the Russian front, Karl Schwarzschild finds the first exact solution to general relativity — and inside it, a radius where the math goes strange.
An invisible X-ray source tugs a blue supergiant around. It is too heavy to be anything else. The first strong black hole candidate is found.
LIGO detects gravitational waves from two black holes merging 1.3 billion light-years away — spacetime itself, ringing like a struck bell.
Eight radio telescopes spanning the planet combine into one, and resolve the glowing ring around M87*'s shadow.
The Event Horizon Telescope releases the picture of Sagittarius A* — the supermassive black hole 26,000 light-years beneath our feet, give or take.
Every image, waveform and dataset from the Event Horizon Telescope and LIGO is public. The frontier is open.