If you don't know what a black hole is then Patrick Moore, Brian Cox and Star Trek fans are pretty pissed off at you right now. (That's Professor Brian Cox, not the actor). I doubt he cares much.
Anyway, here's a little physics lesson. It's very basic cos, well, I have an MA in English, not astrophysics.
Black holes have the ability to swallow up stars, galaxies, the universe, and anything and everything in between that. Once they've done that there'll be nothing left; even they will die.
They're more destructive than...well...let's not get into politics.
The Sun has quotes from NASA explaining there are many more black holes in all the galaxies than previously thought. It stated that this could mean: "Tens of thousands to millions of these black holes could exist within our galaxy, about three to thousands of times as many as previous studies have suggested." So there's more of the bastards. Having said that, "three to thousands of times." That's like me telling me you my bank balance is between one pound and a million bad boys. (So that'd be about the equivalent of about four times more black holes).
Astronomers have also spotted what is known as a 'stealth black hole' and that could be bloody awful! A stealth black hole is just as dangerous but sneakier. Think Littlefinger. I just hope that was a fucking long telescope - I'm not ready to be sucked in by forces stronger than The Mountain. (Apologies for a double Game of Thrones pun here). Now it's finished we'll have to write about something else for a bit at LAD HQ and that is about as traumatic for me as the end of the world.
And the truly chilling fact is that, as well as there being loads more of them, some experts are claiming they're probably far nearer, too.
Arash Bahramian, from the University of Alberta, has this warming news for us: "Unless we were incredibly lucky to find one source like this in a small patch of the sky, there must be many more of these black holes in our Galaxy than we used to think." Lucky? What the hell is wrong with you?
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Then Robin Arnason, at Western University, went one more level of scaring the shit out of us by putting this into perspective of what it means. "Some of these undiscovered black holes could be closer to Earth than we previously thought." How close, Robin, you teasing bastard!
This is proper Elijah Wood/Morgan Freeman/Bruce Willis/Pierce Brosnan end of the world shit. And for our younger readers, it's time to get on IMDb.
Words Patrick Hulbert
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