Black Holes are at the same time the most frightening and fascinating of astronomy’s recent discoveries. If a very massive star begins a gravitational collapse near the end of its life and implodes, it is possible that the material rushing inwards could reach the speed of light and disappear beyond what today is called the “event horizon”. To an outside observer, the moment that this happened the object would disappear or blink out, leaving a small ever increasing “hole” in space, a sort of globular space-time warp which allows no matter, light, or energy to escape from it—the material, to the observer, has in fact “ceased to exist”. Within the Black Hole the material is compressed to an infinitely small point—what happens then can only be conjectured. Recently astronomers have detected the deepest musical note ever generated in the cosmos, a B-flat flying through space like a ripple on an invisible pond. No human will actually hear the note, because it is 57 octaves below the keys in the middle of a piano. It is thought this and similar waves in space are caused by energy being thrown off by black holes and traveling through interstellar and intergalactic dust clouds.

Supermassive Black Hole in Centaurus A, Chandra, courtesy NASA