According to the law of conservation of mass a black hole shouldn't exist right?
814835
Any matter that falls into the black hole adds to the mass of the black hole.  It just doesn't vanish.
453304
There are many thoeries to how this process works...we all know that black holes are the decayed from of a supermassive star.  Technically the universe would have to all collapse before it could expand...like a star it has massivle amouts of atomic energy, and non atomic...al matter was inside this small, infinitely dense space.  Then, the big bang appeared and everything expaned.  My personal theory or space time is that there is no limate to space therefore there is no limit in time...there is no beginning or end to either becaus they are related to each other and mush remain at a simimal or equal constant.  Thus everything within time has a finite length.  The events in time will end, but not time itself.  There is a lot to all of these theories.  Anyways the point to this is that there is a center to the universe but not space.  Anything that is a mass has some ammount of gravity...some, though have more energy than others.  This is what makes a black hole.  the things in a black hole are packed into an infinitely small space.  Then hydrogen plasma shoots out of some supermassive blackholes.  this energy still remains a mysterty to me on how it can escape the black hole, almost like the big bang, but more controlled.  there WAS a mass at the center of everything, but how that works still is a mystery.  I think that there were once supersupermassive aters where the center of our calaxy is today.  this explain the expansion of out galaxy and the surrounding stars and such.  So there was once a biis mass that keeps dividing till it smaller.  Sadly at the end of our universe, everything will once again be absorbed.  That last part is my thoery.  But can we survive?  Well I hope I answered you're question thurough enough.  My hands are kinda tired.\n\nBTW...does the stuff I said too confusing or does it work..I'm not exaclty the sharpest when it comes to these things but I'm pretty sure I know what I'm talking about?
448057
There are many theories regarding this subject. One being that there are "white holes" opposite the black holes, in other universes, or other parts of this one out of which the matter shoots.  But the most likely is that it gets added to the mass of the black hole, making it even more massive and dense.  So in essence it doesn't "go" anywhere, it crosses the event horizon, becomes squished and spaghettified by the immense gravity and simply becomes part of the black hole.\n-Duo
920733
Steven Hawking has recently changed his view that no "information" could escape a black hole.  Current thinking is that as matter falls into a black hole, some radiation / information escapes across the event horizon.  So according to current thinking black holes are not completely "black"
473814
General relativity (as well as most other metric theories of gravity) not only says that black holes can exist, but in fact predicts that they will be formed in nature whenever a sufficient amount of mass gets packed in a given region of space, through a process called gravitational collapse. For example, if you compressed the Sun to a radius of three kilometers, about four millionths of its present size, it would become a black hole. As the mass inside the given region of space increases, its gravity becomes stronger — or, in the language of relativity, the space around it becomes increasingly deformed. Eventually gravity gets so strong that nothing can escape, an event horizon is formed, and matter and energy must inevitably collapse into a singularity.
1019775
LAYMAN'S THEORY\n\nBlack holes are objects so massive and compact that no physical body or signal—not even light—can escape from their gravitational pull once it has crossed the so-called "event horizon" around the black hole (for a black hole of the mass of our sun the event horizon would have a radius of just 3 km, hence black holes are comparably small objects in astronomical terms). Besides the frequent stellar mass black holes (which are thought to be generated at the death of stars about 10 times or more massive than our sun) there is a second class of black holes, which reside in the centers of almost all galaxies and are a million to billion times as massive as our sun. Such so-called supermassive black holes are thought to be the central engine of "Quasars," the most distant and luminous objects known in the universe. Their electromagnetic emission is thought to arise when gas heats up to temperatures of million of degrees before falling beyond the event horizon of a supermassive black hole. In order to find evidence for the existence of such objects, one has to show that so much matter is concentrated in such a small volume that all alternatives to black hole can be excluded—e.g., dense clusters of dark astrophysical bodies such as planets, neutron stars, etc. This is a difficult task in extragalactic systems because of their incredibly large distance. The center of our home galaxy, the Milky Way, however, is about 100 times closer than our next major neighbour galaxy, the Andromeda galaxy. Therefore the undertaking of finding strong direct evidence for the existence of supermassive black holes is most easily done in the Milky Way. For probing the gravitational field at the center of the Milky Way one can use stars as test particles. Imagine the following scenario: If our sun did not give off any light, we would still know of its existence because the gravitational pull of the Sun (along with the angular momentum of the Earth) makes our home planet move around it once a year. In a similar way we have observed the movements of stars close to the supposed supermassive black hole, called Sagittarius A*, in the center of our Milky Way for over a decade. A star was found that moves around Sagittarius A* once every 15 years. By inferring the properties of its orbit with the help of Kepler's laws it was straightforward to show that the (dark) object that forces the star onto its orbit must have about 3.5 million times as much mass as our sun. Furthermore, this mass must be concentrated into a volume just about three times as large as our solar system. Since there is no other known physical object with these properties that can be stable over a significant length of time (compared to the lifetime of our galaxy of about 10 billion years) we concluded that the Sagittarius A* is indeed a supermassive black hole.
993739
The laws of physics can never be defied. It sometimes seems that way when touching upon a subject we don't yet fully understand (like for example a black hole). The truth is we don't yet know the full extent of physical laws that govern these phenomena.
730061
Any mass contained in a radius smaller than its schwarzschild radius, is a black hole.  It does not have to form via the collapse of a star, though this is one astrophysical process that can do it.  \n\nr_s = (2GM/c^2) with\n\nc= the speed of light, G = the gravitational constant and M is the mass of the object.\n\nThe schwarzschild radius scales linearally with mass (an object twice as massive will have twice the schwarzschild radius) and to get you started, an object the mass of the sun (2x10^30kg) has a Schwarzschild radius of 3 km. In otherwords, if you jammed the sun into a sphere 6km across, it would be a black hole. The schwarzschild radius indicates a volume of space where the escape velocity from the mass in question is the speed of light or greater. Using the linear scaling, an object the mass of the earth (6(?)x10^24 kg would have a schwarzschild radius of about 1/300,000 of 3km, or 1 cm.\n\nIt is called a black hole because no light that crosses the schwarzschild radius can completely escape the mass to an infinite distance. (This does mean that if you are just outside the schwarzschild radius yourself, you CAN see light that is emitted from within it, or passes within it as long as it is not too close; only an observer at d= infinity cannot.) Thus this volume of space appears "black." You can read more about black holes on wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/black_hole....\n\nThe Schwarzschild radius is typically defined for an observer at infinite distance, however the event horizon (or Schwarzschild surface) corresponds to the Schwarzschild radius as seen at any distance.  As an observer approaches the singularity, the event horizon contracts as seen from that observer's frame of reference. \n\nThis page illustrates this effect nicely.\nhttp://casa.colorado.edu/~ajsh/approach.html#schwarzschild.surface
387898
Black holes are food for my brain and curiosity. I love the subject it is so interesting!\nBackround info: A black hole is a concentration of mass great enough that the force of gravity prevents anything from escaping from it except through quantum tunneling behavior. The gravitational field is so strong that the escape velocity near it exceeds the speed of light. This implies that nothing, not even light, can escape its gravity, hence the word "black." The term "black hole" is widespread, even though it does not refer to a hole in the usual sense, but rather a region of space from which nothing can return. Theoretically, black holes can have any size, from microscopic to near the size of the observable universe.\nBlack holes are predicted by general relativity. According to classical general relativity, neither matter nor information can flow from the interior of a black hole to an outside observer. For example, one cannot bring out any of its mass, or receive a reflection back by shining a light source such as a flashlight, or retrieve any information about the material that has entered the black hole. Quantum mechanical effects may allow matter and energy to radiate from black holes; however, it is thought that the nature of the radiation does not depend on what has fallen into the black hole in the past.\n\nThe existence of black holes in the universe is well supported by astronomical observation, particularly from studying supernovae and X-ray emissions from active galactic nuclei.\nMy answer 1)time travel when you, or in this case an object, goes fast the world goes slow. and if something, a black hole, is going, or sucking, fast enough, the world around you will eventually begin to reverse.
600386
You don't need a black hole to be able hold itself together through gravity. Just look at the earth or the moon for example. They are nowhere near as dense as a black hole, yet they support themselves gravitationally.
557703
Black holes are huge concentrations of mass in a very small area.  So small that it is too small to contain conventional matter as we understand it.  There is a perimeter around a black hole known as the event horizon.  Beyond this point, nothing, not even light can escape the gravitational pull of a black hole.  If you were to be able to stand on the event horizon and have telescopic vision like Superman, looking tangent to the event horizon, you would see the back of your head.
72214
Black holes almost certainly exist. Wormholes almost certainly do not.
1079881
The more mass you add to a black hole, the BIGGER if gets. The only way to make a black hole disappear (according to Stephen Hawkins) is to leave it alone for a very very long time. It will very slowly evaporate if you don't add more mass to it.
176071
What lies at the exact center of black holes is not known. Relativity equations point to the center of a black hole being what's called a "singularity," but that would be a point of zero volume containing infinite mass. Obviously impossible. As things now stand, our laws of physics simply do not apply to what the center of a black hole might be.
274083
No.  A black hole is an immensely dense object, like taking all the matter in our solar system plus more, and condensing it to the size of a pea or so.  The moment we could "create" one, the entire earth would be "sucked into" it.
711640
Sorry to Sun of Samsa.  I meant to give you a thumbs up!  The Black Hole Singularity is infinitely small (infinite density and ZERO volume).  The effects of the hole can be miles or light years across!
133586
well its supposed to be constant no matter where it is. but think about this: black holes are said to be black because the light is not fast enough to escape the force of gravity. like on earth the acceleration of that force is 9.81 m/s/s so if you went faster than that then you could leave earth. so the gravity in black holes is greater than the speed of light. now that means that the light "falls" back in. but gravity only acts on things with mass so this means light has mass, which would make sense. which means it must be very slightly affected by lesser gravity as well. so if it is on the outskirts of the universe where there is less gravity the velocity should be slightly different.