Question: How long does a black hole last for and how strong is it's gravitational pull

Bella Boulderstone answered on 14 Jun 2019:

So the gravitational pull of an object is related to how much mass it has – how much stuff makes it up. So you and I are made out of stuff and we have (very faint) gravitational pulls. Planets have gravitational pulls, the sun has a gravitational pull, and so do black holes. Black holes’ gravitational pull is related to the amount of mass it has, for such a bizarre object, things can orbit around them, just like things can orbit around the sun.

So some black holes have big gravitational pulls because they have millions of times the amount of stuff at the very center than our sun and some only have tens of times the amount of stuff at the very center than our sun. There’s a big range!

How long a black hole lasts is a really good question and something that’s a hot debate in science. Some scientists think that they have to last forever because nothing can escape from them. Other scientists think that they have to ‘evaporate’ eventually because there are laws of nature that say we can’t just lose all this information to nowhere. The evaporation that these black holes would give off is called ‘Hawking Radiation’ and was proposed by Stephen Hawking himself.