The Power To Destroy Entire Worlds! | Strip the Cosmos | Science Channel

Black holes, the most powerful objects in the universe, capable of destroying entire worlds. For decades, they have terrified us with their mystery and darkness. The reason why we call a black hole black is because light cannot be emitted from inside the black hole. It's a one-way street. It can go in, but it can't come out. If you're close to a black hole, they're terrifying. There's huge amounts of matter that can fall into them. This matter gets very hot. It gets torn apart. It falls into this basically infinitely deep hole in the universe itself. But there's more to black holes than chaos and destruction. The more we learn about black holes, the more we understand they have a real purpose in our universe. They're sort of cosmic organizers. They bring things together. Could new discoveries change how we see black holes? I definitely think it's time for an image makeover for black holes. Black holes are more than darkness. Stripping away a donut-shaped shroud of cold dust on the outside reveals a huge disk of cosmic debris spinning at millions of miles an hour. This is where the black hole feasts. Gas, dust, shattered stars, and planets all descend into the gaping mouth of the black hole. It's called the event horizon. It's a perfectly dark sphere from which no light can escape. Inside, the laws of the cosmos break down. Black holes are a place where some of the rules we think about in the universe don't apply as well as they do out here. When you're falling into a black hole, you move faster and faster and faster, and you finally reach the speed of light as you pass into the black hole itself. But then what happens inside of that? We don't know. We are confronting something that the human brain doesn't understand, where space and time itself break down, don't behave the way we think of them. That's going to push us to evolve, to understand the very nature of reality better. 30 years ago, black holes were purely theoretical, a mathematical prediction made by Einstein. But now we know they're very real. This is our galaxy, the Milky Way. Stripping away its stars, planets, rocks, and dust reveals a dark secret. Lurking in the shadows is a massive black hole, Sagittarius A star, 4 million times the mass of our sun and just 26,000 light years from Earth. Studying this titan offers us a chance to understand how black holes truly work. On top of Hawaii's tallest mountain, Mauna Kea, scientists at the Keck Observatory do just that. Astronomer James Like studies Sagittarius A star. It's so unique to have a black hole that massive, that close to us, because all the other ones that are that massive are so far away in other galaxies. Getting to his office requires a 14,000-foot climb along a steep and winding dirt road. I've loved telescopes for a long time, and these are the biggest and the best. So if you want to get the faintest objects in the universe, if you want to look at the finest detail, you have to come to Keck. It takes your breath away. Today, James prepares Keck's 300-ton telescope to monitor Sagittarius A star. The telescope's going to come very close, right behind me. It takes a dedicated crew of 20 guys to get this thing running every night of the year. It's a very complex machine. The constant movement of the Earth's atmosphere bends light and makes stars twinkle. This distortion stops scientists from getting a clear view of the Milky Way. But the team at Keck has cracked this problem. As night falls, James shoots a bright laser 50 miles up into the atmosphere. We take pictures of the return from that laser. It gets fuzzed up by the atmosphere just the same way as the natural star does. By altering the telescope's mirrors, James brings this beam of light into focus. This allows him to calibrate the telescope and obtain the sharpest images ever seen of objects in the Milky Way. It's a revolution in astronomy. This is technology that was dreamed about for years. It's a bit of a game changer. We now can see things that we never could see before. James and his team are making startling discoveries that are changing our understanding of how black holes work. They have detected a mysterious object close to Sagittarius A star. It's called G2, a cloud of interstellar gas which may contain a star. Its future is bleak. Scientists believe the black hole will slingshot part of the cloud into space. And then gorge on the remains, growing even more massive and powerful. G2 happens to be one of the closest objects to the black hole. Anytime you get that close to that extreme of an environment, you get to see new physics. You get to see fantastic things. Soon, the team will see a black hole feeding for the very first time. Sagittarius A star is 4 million times more massive than the sun. But 300 million light years away, there's a black hole 5,000 times larger. Deep inside a galaxy called NGC 4889 is the biggest black hole ever found. It's so powerful, it can shred supergiant stars that come too close. What gives black holes the power to destroy entire worlds?