Ever wondered what might happen if you tried to destroy a black hole?
Well, the thought might not have crossed your mind, but luckily it did for the brains behind YouTube channel Kurzgesagt.
The informative channel is a brilliant place to stop if you want to learn a lot in a very short amount of time - its videos are famous for breaking down massively complex ideas into digestible chunks that can actually be understandable to normal people.
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Back in August 2023, it made black holes the focus of an 11-minute video that you absolutely shouldn't miss if you're at all interested in astronomy.
Black holes are some of the most persistently mysterious parts of our galactic existence - massive anomalies that we know exist, but haven't really been able to fully understand.
There are loads of details about black holes that we can't confirm, and therefore plenty of information about these astral entities comes down to speculation or educated guesses.
This ace video breaks down the concept of black holes quickly but focuses on an intriguing central question - could you destroy a black hole? And if you did, what might happen?
Well, it's the sort of question that sounds like it has bad answers, and Kurzgesagt confirms that a lot of the outcomes of trying to destroy a black hole - whether by throwing nuclear weaponry at it or trying to collide it with a star - can be quite catastrophic for massive swathes of space around it.
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One of the fun parts of how we believe black holes work is that they'll destroy themselves at a certain point - they can only grow so large before they collapse in on themselves and get effectively deleted.
One option Kurzgesagt puts forward is that you could give the black hole more objects than it can actually feed on (since black holes famously suck in matter).
Enough of the material could theoretically override the point when the black hole would collapse, instead destroying what's called its 'event horizon', a notional boundary around the black hole, without destroying the 'singularity' inside it.
This would count as destruction, but as Kurzgesagt says, it could also redefine or even undermine the systems of physics that we know and understand - you're immediately into the realms of science fiction at that point, dealing with pure speculation.
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Needless to say, once you're at this section of the video around six minutes in, things get pretty trippy and confusing.
We're talking about collapses of space-time and continuity - the meaning of time changing and becoming unreliable, possibly resulting in endless potential outcomes.
It's conceptual stuff, and pretty mesmerizing as the video accelerates to its open-ended conclusion - be sure to check it out to learn more about black holes and the secrets they might hold.