The disturbing truth about black holes is that there are boundary between the known universe and the place that would forever lie beyond the reach of science. They are in an anomaly of gravity so strange that it is barely possible to comprehend. 

 

Black holes represent the regions where our current theories of physics completely fail. What actually happens there we don’t know. So it’s this very weird situation where our own understanding kind of predicts its own failure. 

 

What gravity tells us is that everything at the centre of a black hole should get smashed together in a region smaller than even a proton or an electron or any kind of regular part of matter. If you were to fall inside what we call the radius of the black hole, the event horizon, and then nothing could get out of that region. 

 

Once it’s gone, it’s gone forever. The great dream for astronomers is to see those final moments as it falls over the edge into a oblivion. 

 

The kind of ideal situation that we are aiming for is to really be able to see what happens very close to the event horizon of a black hole. This is not something we can do in a laboratory on earth. So the only hope is to use observations of black holes in the universe to actually see what’s happening. And that is kind of the Holy Grail of astronomical observations of black hole.