Imagine, if you will, a baked potato. Its pretty normal as far as baked potatoes go: brown, slightly mushy, and better with salt. There is only one thing that makes this baked potato uniqueits 30 times the size of our sun. Obviously, this presents some problems for the hungry scientist. For one thing, every portion of the potato is gravitationally pulled towards every other portion of the potato. The portions on the outside are pulled toward the center, since that is where the most potato parts lie. It quickly becomes an almost perfect sphere, any irregularities crushed to the ground. Those in the center are pulled outwards in all directions equally, resulting in no overall movement. There is thus tremendous pressure exerted on the center of the potato by its own gravitational pull. AT this point, the core is squeezed to the point where its very atoms collide, creating enormous energy. The center explodes. The explosive force of matter and energy pushes outward, balancing the gravity pushing inward. The potato reaches an uneasy equilibrium: constantly exploding and imploding at the same time; a floating ball of fire in space. We have successfully baked our potato. For the next few million years, our giant baking potato acts like a giant fusion reactor. It burns the elements in its core, producing tremendous force to counteract the constant pull of gravity. Simpler elements collide to form heaver ones, so hydrogen is the first to go. The potato eventually runs out of that, and gravity makes its move. The center compresses further, until its hot enough to fuse the next element up, helium. Being a potato, there isnt much of that, and so the fusion cycle continues for a while. When it reaches iron, a strange thing happens: it isnt fused. Iron is an incredibly stable element, and the amount of energy required to turn it into something heavier is beyond even our potatos power. As the other elements are used up, eventually only iron is left; A perfect giant sphere of it at the very core. Something tragic and beautiful happens then. Our potato has been burning for millions of years, and its all about to end. The potato has no energy left. Gravity wins. It pushes inward, and this time there is no fusion to stop it. It pushes the elements, the atoms, brings even the electrons togethera single moment and that which makes up everything touches, kisses, hugs each other for the first and last timeand keeps on pushing. The core becomes a point. Just a dot, with no width or depth or space. Its only gravity now. The gravity of a former potato thirty times the size of the sun, all in a space so small it can hardly be called a space. The outer layers of the potato are brushed away into the cosmos by the aftershock of the event, to be forgotten among the stars. Observers far away might note an explosion in deep space, then they too will turn their attention elsewhere. No one sees whats left behind. The gravity of that single point which lies there is so intense that nothing can escape for one hundred miles away. Nothing. Not even light itself, the fastest possible thing in the universe. Think about that: a space the size of Honolulu, in which anything that enters never leaves. It was a potato once, and now its a hole in space itself. A black hole, if you will. Our former potatonow black holestill has close to the same mass it started off with. Its in a smaller area, but the stuff it was made of is still there, in some form. Occasionally, a nebula or a star may cross its path, and will be swallowed by the black hole. What made up the star will be added to what made up our potato, indistinguishable in every way. As the mass increases, so will the size of its gravitational pull. The point at which even light itself cannot escapecalled the event horizongrows larger. As for the insidethere is no way to know what is happening inside. Nothing can ever come back to tell us. All we know now is that the black hole consumes, and grows, and eats, and grows. But one day the stars will die. Nebulae will disperse. Galaxies will crumble away. The universe will grow old one day, and our black hole will still be there. Eons will pass, and nobody will be there to watch the worlds clock tick, tick, tick; Our black hole will still be there. Humanity will become a distant memory, and the concept of memory itself will be forgottenOur black hole will still be there. It will still be there, when everything else has reached its end. H.P. Lovecraft once said that with strange aeons even death may die, and perhaps he was right. Black holes represent a sort of cosmic death, and black holes themselves will someday die. No one will be there to witness it, but space itselfthe shifting quantum foam that softly bubbles everywherewill take its due. At all timeseven nowparticles are created out of the foam, both of matter and its twin, antimatter. The two are born, then touch, then annihilate each other. This dance of death takes place all around us, every second of every day. We dont notice it, since we dont have to: The particles are gone as soon as they appear, leaving no net energy behind. Around a black hole however, things are different. If the particles appear near the event horizon, one may fall in, while the other escapes. The one that escapes must by definition have an incredible amount of energy, in order to flee the gravity well. Since both particles brought together produce zero net energy, the one that fell into the black hole must have negative energy. Einstein famously showed that energy can be converted to mass, so in some sense the black hole just lost mass. It shrunk. Over an unimaginable length of time, this shrinking by quantum radiationHawking radiation, as it is called will become noticeable. The particles involved are among the smallest known, so for a practical eternity they have little effect. Of course, we have forever to wait. One day the last star will die, and the only source of energy left will be hawking radiation. If there is anyone left alive, they will have to live off of its power, scant though that may be. As the black hole gets smaller, the curve of the event horizon becomes more pronounced. This makes it easier for quantum particles to diverge, since the gravitational pull will be significantly different depending on how close to the horizon they are. The hawking radiation thus becomes stronger, and the black hole shrinks faster. Our black holeonce a giant potato the size of thirty suns will die in an explosion of hawking radiation, millions of megatons flowing from an event horizon the size of a proton. Our potato will be the dying light of a black universe. Now thats food for thought. Further reading: https://www.livescience.com/39620-how-big-is-solar-system.html https://www.aanda.org/articles/aa/pdf/2013/06/aa20920-12.pdf https://arxiv.org/abs/1511.08221 http://www.slate.com/blogs/quora/2013/11/12/what_would_the_death_of_a_black_hole_look_like.html PS: Wow, I'm impressed you read all that! If you liked it, well, thanks I guess :3 If you're confused, good. The plan is working. MWAH HA HA HA! -Yitz