Black Hole Facts; Plus a Free Student Handout from AccessScience
Help students stretch their minds and understand the gravity of the black hole phenomenon.
Access to this content is available to Ward’s World readers for free from McGraw Hill’s AccessScience, an award-winning, digital STEM resource that provides immediate, authoritative answers to students’ thirst for scientific knowledge on topics such as climate change, virology, pollution, and more. Ward’s World and McGraw Hill have partnered to offer educators a no-obligation, free trial subscription to this product. Request your free trial today and discover how valuable AccessScience can be for you and your students.
High School
Calling all astrophiles!
You’ll be sure to excite the astrophiles, budding astronomers and scientists in your class by including spacey facts and far-out lessons about black holes.
Your students will be mesmerized by such mind-bending facts like
- A black hole is not really a hole at all! It’s an enormously dense object. Anything falls into can never escape. Never!
- Our Milky Way galaxy has a black hole (4 million times the Sun’s mass)! However, it’s light years away from earth, so we’re safe for now.
- Based on Einstein’s theory of general relativity, if someone fell into a black hole, time would slow down for them relative to an outside observer. But slowed time would be the least of their worries, considering the black hole’s extreme gravitational force.
- The first black hole imaged by researchers was found in the M87 galaxy (55 million light-years away) and is 6.5 billion times the Sun’s mass.1
These are mind-boggling facts for sure! But, with your help, students can stretch their minds and understand the gravity of the black hole phenomenon.
Download McGraw Hill's AccessScience article, Black Hole, to develop your lesson plans that help students understand the key concepts about this region of spacetime. The free download also includes assessment questions and answers you can use to test student understanding. Download teacher key here.
1. Nasa.gov
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