![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/DR-UNI-LOGO-2-300x127.jpg\"){kind=logo}
Dr. Universe: What Is A White Hole? \u2014 Darwin, 11, British Columbia, Canada and Rubal, 9, Australia<\/p>\nDr. Universe: What Is A White Hole? \u2014 Darwin, 11, British Columbia, Canada and Rubal, 9, Australia<\/p>\n
Dear Darwin and Rubal,<\/p>\n
Before I read your question, I had never heard of a white hole. So, I scampered over to my friend Vivienne Baldassare to find out more. She\u2019s an astrophysicist at Washington State University.<\/p>\n
She told me that, so far, white holes are just an idea. It\u2019s what happens if you take math about black holes and work it backwards. \u201cWhite holes are really the mathematical inverse of a black hole,\u201d Baldassare said. \u201cBut we have no reason to think they exist right now.\u201d<\/p>\n
A black hole is an area in space that has gobs of gravity.<\/p>\n
We\u2019re familiar with the gravity we experience on Earth. That\u2019s the force that holds everything\u2014our bodies, our buildings, even the oceans\u2014on Earth. It\u2019s why we don\u2019t float off into space. That gravity happens because our planet is super big. All the matter that makes the Earth pulls on our bodies.<\/p>\n
A black hole is made of matter, too. It\u2019s crammed together into a super small space. Scientists say it\u2019s dense\u2014super tightly packed together. The pull of gravity in a black hole is so strong that nothing can escape\u2014not even light. Something inside a black hole would need to travel faster than the speed of light to get away. Since nothing can move that fast, nothing can ever get out.<\/p>\n
A white hole would be the opposite. It would be a region in space where nothing could ever go fast enough to get in. It might be a one-way space fountain that spews matter out into space.<\/p>\n
A black hole forms when a massive star dies. Its core collapses and makes an explosion called a supernova. Then all that remaining matter crushes together into a dense point. It\u2019s unclear what natural event could cause a white hole. To make it work mathematically on paper, you run time backwards. It\u2019s hard to imagine that happening in real life. But if it did, there could be incredible implications.<\/p>\n
\u201cSome theories suggest that maybe white holes are on the other side of black holes in another universe,\u201d Baldassare said. \u201cSo, we\u2019d have a black hole in our universe, and it would lead to a white hole in another universe\u2014but it\u2019s all very theoretical.\u201d<\/p>\n
If that sounds like a fun way to travel between universes, I\u2019m sorry to say that nobody could survive a trip like that. They\u2019d be squeezed into noodles by the gravity in the black hole\u2014called spaghettification\u2014long before they popped out through the white hole.<\/p>\n
But don\u2019t completely give up on finding white holes. People have been thinking about space objects like black holes since way back in the 1600s. That\u2019s wild because we didn\u2019t confirm black holes were real until 1971. The first ever photo of a black hole happened in 2019. And those are super big or super common objects. \u201cThere are super massive black holes that are millions and billions of times the mass of the sun,\u201d Baldassare said. \u201cAnd then there are smaller black holes all over the place. Every galaxy has millions of them.\u201d<\/p>\n
Maybe it\u2019ll just take some time to get our paws on a matter-spewing space fountain.<\/p>\n
Sincerely,<\/p>\n
Dr. Universe<\/p>\n
Ask Dr. Universe is a science-education project from Washington State University. Visit AskDrUniverse.wsu.edu to read more Q&A\u2019s, or to send in a science question of your own \u2013 or that of a kid you know \u2013 for a chance to be featured in a future Q&A. Or you can write to: Ask Dr. Universe Washington State University ITB 2013B Pullman, WA 99164<\/p>\n
This is the first photo ever taken of a black hole. It\u2019s at the center of the M87 galaxy\u2014about 55 million light years from Earth. \u00a9Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration.<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/mail.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) \u2014 a planet-scale array of eight ground-based radio telescopes forged through international collaboration \u2014 was designed to capture images of a black hole. In coordinated press conferences across the globe, EHT researchers revealed that they succeeded, unveiling the first direct visual evidence of the supermassive black hole in the centre of Messier 87 and its shadow. The shadow of a black hole seen here is the closest we can come to an image of the black hole itself, a completely dark object from which light cannot escape. The black hole\u2019s boundary \u2014 the event horizon from which the EHT takes its name \u2014 is around 2.5 times smaller than the shadow it casts and measures just under 40 billion km across. While this may sound large, this ring is only about 40 microarcseconds across \u2014 equivalent to measuring the length of a credit card on the surface of the Moon. Although the telescopes making up the EHT are not physically connected, they are able to synchronize their recorded data with atomic clocks \u2014 hydrogen masers \u2014 which precisely time their observations. These observations were collected at a wavelength of 1.3 mm during a 2017 global campaign. Each telescope of the EHT produced enormous amounts of data \u2013 roughly 350 terabytes per day \u2013 which was stored on high-performance helium-filled hard drives. These data were flown to highly specialised supercomputers \u2014 known as correlators \u2014 at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy and MIT Haystack Observatory to be combined. They were then painstakingly converted into an image using novel computational tools developed by the collaboration.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Dr. Universe: What Is A White Hole? \u2014 Darwin, 11, British Columbia, Canada and Rubal, 9, Australia Dear…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":168727,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37],"tags":[9,24,63,122,124,123],"class_list":["post-168726","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-queens","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-nyc","tag-queens","tag-queens-headlines","tag-queens-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/168726","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=168726"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/168726\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/168727"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=168726"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=168726"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=168726"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}