From the brains behind brains on, this is the moment of um.

Answering those questions that make you go.

Um, um, um, um, um, um. I'm Ruby Guthrie.

One of my favorite things to think about are black holes.

I mean, they're just so strange. Do you know what a black hole is? It's a place in

space where the gravity is so strong nothing gets out, not even light.

That's why they're called black holes.

They don't reflect light like most other things in the universe,

so we can't see them.

How do we know they're there? Because we can see how they affect the other

objects around them. They can devour the stuff around them. But what happens if two black holes just ran into each other?

One of our listeners wanted to know that too.

Hi, my name is Anstyl, and I'm from Texas and can't. And can black holes eat other black holes?

Well, I'd say yes, and that's actually a very important question.

Hi, my name is Marcos. I'm a graduate student, and I study small black holes.

Black holes are black, right? We can't see them. So to be able to see them, we instead look at how they

interact with other things, including each other. So in another black hole, it hits another black hole, what happens is that they usually form

an in a pair and they're spinning just like planets spin around one another, right, or the earth around the sun.

And they're throwing away energy in the form of waves,

just like water waves.

And since their energy is leaving this system,

they start to get closer.

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