• If you fell into a black hole, gravity would stretch you out like spaghetti. Don't worry; your death would come before you reached singularity.
• Black holes do not "suck." Suction is caused by pulling something into a vacuum, which the massive black hole definitely is not. Instead, objects fall into them.
• Albert Einstein first predicted black holes in 1916 with his general theory of relativity.
• The term "black hole" was coined in 1967 by American astronomer John Wheeler.
• The first object considered to be a black hole is Cygnus X-1. Rockets carrying Geiger counters discovered eight new x-ray sources. In 1971, scientists detected radio emission coming from Cygnus X-1, and a massive hidden companion was found and identified as a black hole.
• Cygnus X-1 was the subject of a 1974 friendly wager between Stephen Hawking and a fellow physicist Kip Thorne, with Hawking betting that the source was not a black hole. In 1990, he conceded defeat.
• Miniature black holes may have formed immediately after the Big Bang. Rapidly expanding space may have squeezed some regions into tiny, dense black holes less massive than the sun.
• If a star passes too close to a black hole, it can be torn apart.
• Astronomers estimate there are anywhere from ten million to a billion stellar black holes, with masses roughly thrice that of the sun, in the Milky Way.
• The interesting relationship between string theory and black holes give rise to more types of massive giants than found under conventional classical mechanics.
Source: http://www.space.com
