Black holes swallow everything that passes their event horizon, the black hole's boundary. They do, however, have a strong attractive force of gravity. As you go closer to the event horizon, the strong pull of gravity accelerates your movement. The event horizon is the point of no return. Once you cross it, you are torn up into your constituent atoms. Yikes.
The further away you are from the gravitational singularity, the black hole's centre, the longer you'll live. Unfortunately, you can't explore a black hole unless you visit one, and since the event leads to certain death, you can tell why we haven't undertaken the journey yet. While black holes may seem like far-off mysteries, they are fairly common. Good old Milky Way has a light-swallowing, supermassive black hole about 27,000 light-years away from us. The good news? It's way too far away from us to do any harm. The bad news? Black holes travelling too close to the Solar System could attract planets away from the life-inducing light of the Sun.
They've also thrown a logical conundrum our way, namely the Information Paradox. This paradox states that quantum information, the stuff that tells our atoms to be a part of a human and not a taco stand, can be destroyed in a black hole. However, quantum information can neither be created nor destroyed, so what's going on here? Scientists have many theories that solve the Information Paradox. What if the information wasn't destroyed, but just existed inside the black hole? The most interesting theory is what is popularly called 'Hologram Theory'. It states that all that information is encoded onto the black hole's event horizon, so it never really gets lost, and the information never really enters the black hole at all. So, theoretically, the quantum information of our atoms could also be encoded on some hypothetical Universe boundary, making us holograms.
Black holes are fascinating. Although there are still thousands of unanswered questions about them, by studying these far-off, planet-eaters' effects, we can learn a whole lot about our lives and our place in this tremendously vast and magical Universe.
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