What are black holes, and can anything escape them?
Black holes are regions of space where the gravitational pull is so strong that nothing, not even light, can escape from them. They are formed when massive stars collapse under their own gravity at the end of their life cycles. The boundary around a black hole beyond which nothing can escape is called the event horizon. Inside the event horizon, the escape velocity exceeds the speed of light, making it impossible for anything to get out. Despite their name, black holes are not empty; they contain a singularity at the center, where all the mass is concentrated in an infinitely small point. Interestingly, Stephen Hawking theorized that black holes can emit radiation (now known as Hawking radiation), which could potentially allow them to lose mass and evaporate over time.