TRUTH STRANGER THAN FICTION

Get your mind around this
                    The closer anything gets to a black hole, the weirder everything gets.  Normal rules don't apply.  Space and time act differently than they do in the normal universe.

The point of no return
                    If anything gets too close to a black hole, it will disappear forever.  Anything that goes past a certain point will be sucked into the black hole.  Nothing, not even light, can ever escape past that point.
                   This imaginary boundary is called the event horizon.  The size of the event horizon depends on the density of the black hole.  Event horizons can range from about 6 miles wide to millions of miles wide.

Now it gets weird
                   Black holes distort, or warp, space.  If you could orbit near the event horizon, you could actually see the back of your head.  The light reflecting from, or bouncing off, the back of your head would be bent around the black hole to your eyes.
                    We will never be able to see a black hole because light cannot escape from beyond the event horizon.

Imagine
                     NASA experts and others like to imagine what would happen if we could get near a black hole.  This helps us understand the mysteries.  For example, we could never really fly into a black hole.  Our friends could not really watch it happen.
                      But just imagine if we could.  If you decided, for some strange reason, to jump out of your spaceship near a black hole, your shipmates safely far away would see you appear to move slower and slower as you got close to the event horizon.  But your friends would never see you actually cross it.  To them, you would appear to stay frozen in one place forever. 
                      To you, time would seem to move normally until all the little bits of you were made part of the black hole.

Science fiction, or is it?
                       A black hole is also called a singularity.  All of the star's matter, and anything else that falls in, is packed into this super-tiny point that can't really be measured.
                       Some scientists think a black hole might be joined by a kind of bridge to another  universe, called a wormhole.  It's impossible to travel through a wormhole now.  But who knows what we'll figure out in the future?