Would it be possible to escape from a black hole, and what are wormholes?

We explore the curious questions that science can answer

If you came closer than a distance called the ‘event horizon’ you would definitely not be going home (Getty/iStock)

Would it be possible to escape from a black hole?

It depends how close to the black hole you got and how big the black hole was. Only if you came closer than a distance called the “event horizon” would you definitely not be going home. But this distance varies in size, depending on how much mass the black hole consists of. Black holes really are very dense: to make the Earth, which has a mass of 6 million billion billion kilograms, into a black hole, it would have to be squashed into a sphere that would fit into the palm of your hand. You would have to get pretty close to a black hole like that before you even noticed it.

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