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Black holes are regions of space where the gravitational pull is so strong that nothing — not even light — can escape. Rather than empty space, black holes are chock full of matter that gets squeezed into a teensy space.  Who discovered black holes? Physicist Karl Schwarzschild accidentally discovered black holes in 1916, when he was figuring out a particular solution to Einstein's general theory of relativity. He was trying to find the solution to the gravitational pull of a single, solitary, symmetric ball of matter — such as the sun at the center of our solar system. But that solution contained a peculiar feature: the theory behaved strangely at a specific radius, known today as the Schwarzschild radius. It was later realized why this radius was so special. If you compressed the mass of an object into a space smaller than that radius, its gravitational pull would overwhelm every known force and nothing could escape. Early physicists assumed that this situ...

The constructions made by high-tech aliens to exploit the resources of the stars could end up destroyed and disappearing into the stellar void. Artist’s interpretation of what a Dyson sphere would look like. Credit: dottedhippo.com Statistically speaking, a human-sized rock impacts the Earth each year releasing amounts of energy similar to that released by the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima at the end of World War II. If it were electricity, this would equal the world’s average usage for 20 seconds; 15 kilotons of TNT. The potential of celestial objects near Earth is determined based on the space they travel. Because there is 60 times more distance between the Earth and the Moon, this means that similar pieces of rock pass within that same separation about 3,600 times more, the equivalent of 300 times per month. Furthermore, within the area bounded by its orbit around the Sun, millions of steps like that happen every year. On Janua...