A meteor is flying aimlessly around the deep corners of space. Suddenly a gigantic vacuum, colliding with other meteors and other stars, pulls it up. The energy of the meteor has been completely drained, and has been transferred to make the special vacuum even more powerful. This vacuum is special, because it is invisible and invincible. Nothing can destroy it. However, the vacuum is not really a vacuum, it exists as a black hole, lying throughout the centers of space. Astronomers sense black holes sit at the centers of many galaxies, including the Milky Way. Direct proof remains that energy is vanishing from volumes of space without a trace. Black holes operate by mass, radiation, surface area, and gravity.
Black holes have no hard surface for matter to accumulate, so matter is swallowed and disappears forever. The event horizon is simply a surface of no return. Everything that falls through it is irretrievably lost from our universe. If a blob of hot plasma falling into a black hole does not have enough time to radiate away its thermal energy, then the heat will be dragged in along with the matter. "Its energy will never be seen by distant observers; it will be adverted: through the horizon and disappear," (Kaufmann 8). This leakage does not violate the law of conservation of mass-energy because the heat energy is incorporated into the mass of the hole. Also, a black hole cannot spin at an arbitrarily fast rate because any surface of the black hole would cease to exist.
That black holes have to surface area, subtly altars the radiation emitted from the vicinity of each type of black hole, allows astronomers to demonstrate that the strangest objects in the cosmos are a reality. "A hole spinning at close to the maximum possible rate could convert 42 percent of infalling mass into energy, whereas a static hole could manage only 6 percent," (Lasota 42). If the particles around the hole can share their energy, for example, by collisions, the infalling matter can be unimaginably hot.
