APOD 4.1

The above image is an artists conception of a black hole. A black hole is a region of spacetime where gravity prevents anything, including light, from escaping. They are often created by the collapse of high-mass stars, but some may have been made right after the "Big Bang." We know that black holes exist because we can see how they bend the light that passes near them. For example, when we look to the center of the Milky Way Galaxy in infrared light, we can see how the light acts differently and is misplaced compared to where the stars surrounding it actually are. The supermassive black hole that is at the center of our galaxy has a mass of 4.3 million solar mass. This is minuscule in comparison to other black holes we have found at the center of other galaxies with masses upwards of one billion solar masses. I selected this image as an APOD because we just finished learning about black holes and neutron stars.