Meet your new friend!

Hi boys and girls! It's me, your old friend the black hole! Now I've been hearing that some of you are afraid of me (or even hate me!) and that turns my smile upside down. After all, I don't hate you for having a finite average density! Maybe all it will take for us to be friends is for me to introduce myself and tell you my place in this fantastic universe we all live in called *ancient name unpronounceable*.

I was born when a big fat star, about 8 times more massive than your Sun (me and my friends call him Sol) died, leaving behind an iron core about 3 times more massive than Sol. Now this big ol' iron core had so much internal gravitational force that it collapsed into a neutron star. Usually it would stop there, but it didn't for this old, dead star! Nope—there was so much matter in that neutron star that it collapsed farther and farther until it be came an infinitely dense (that's really really small but still really really heavy!) singularity. That's me, the black hole.

Hi!

Some of you may think I suck, and that hurts my feelings. According to a smart dead guy, Newton, there are only three allowed orbits: elliptic (circley or eggey looking), or parabolic/hyperbolic (looks like a big, wide U). "Sucking" isn't an orbit, silly! Actually, if your Sol were to artificially turn into a black hole (which it couldn't naturally—there just isn't enough stuff in it), Earth's orbit wouldn't change one bit (although it would be quite brrr and dark outside).

As a matter of fact, in order to truly get pulled into a black hole, you'd have to get within three times what's called a Schwarzchild radius of me.

The Schwarzchild radius of a black hole (me) is basically the distance from the singularity (where all the 'stuff' is!) to the event horizon (the imaginary bubble surrounding me that separates what I see from what the rest of the universe can see). According to a formula Mr. Schwarzchild wrote down, my particular Schwarzchild radius is only 9 kilometers! That means you'd have to get within 27km of me before you'd be my special friend forever.

To compare, the radius of the Earth is 6378km!

Some smart guys say that the center of your galaxy contains black holes just like me. If these black holes weren't there, what could your solar system orbit around? You'd probably just be out by yourselves expanding with the rest of the universe (and boy would the night sky have a lot less visible stars!). Heck, you wouldn't even have a solar system to call home if not for my friends making your galaxy possible!

Hello my friends, all you guyses;

Stellar objects come in all shapes and sizes.

Don't be afraid just listen to me—

Let me tell you about equality.

You'll never ever run out of luck,

At least with black holes 'cause they don't suck!