It's a good thing we are so perfectly placed huh? Those great big gas giants out there acting like big vacuum cleaners, sucking up all the debris in the solar system, leaving it relatively clear for us.
To me, a black hole, while complex and fascinating, is no more mysterious than a twister or malestrom. It's not some doorway to another dimension and it doesn't pop out at the other end somewhere. "Hole" is probably a bad name for it in that regard, as it isn't actually a hole at all. If a star is massive enough and collapses, once it has finished putting out energy as heat and light from it's fission life, then gravity wins and there is no more outward pressure to hold it out. Instead, it keeps on collapsing and crushes itself to death. In effect, it is taking several solar masses (the weight of our own sun as a scale) and compressing them onto a point that is less than microscopic in size. Great mass, but no size really. It has the same amount of gravitational influence on it's surroundings as it did when it was a star. If you fly too close and too slow, you are going to get pulled in and added to it's mass as you are crushed. There's no hole, just a point, also known as a singularity.
It's thought that super-massive black-holes exist at the centre of most galaxies, acting as the anchor that stops them from breaking up and flying off into space as they spin. Pretty cool stuff. Not the all-consuming monsters they were made out to be in all the old 80's movies.
Yes thanks mate, fairly familiar with Slooh. I'm currently imaging a comet called Lemmon. Just waiting for these darned clouds to rack off and give me a good night of imaging. I put a quick 2-minute image
here, but waiting to stack a few dozen of these to process it properly.
