It is a piece of space that weighs as much as several million suns.
Here, gravity reigns, and it is harsh: the black hole tugs inevitably at anything that gets too close – a cloud of cosmic dust, an entire star the size of our sun – and swallows it.
Nothing, not even light, can escape a black hole, which means astronomers on Earth, watching the thing from afar, can’t see it.
Astronomers know that the black hole is there because they can observe what is happening around it.
They can be fully characterised by only two properties: mass and spin rate. Mass is, in plainspeak, the amount of matter contained in a body (or, the weight) and spin rate is, the rate at which the body spins.
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