We Thought Black Holes Ended in Singularities. They Might End In a Frozen Big Bang.

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For a while back there we might be able to avoid the black hole. They’d been lurking as shadows in our theories of gravity forever. Enough mass crammed into a small enough space would lead to a gravitational field at the surface from which not even light could escape from a surrounding surface that we call the event horizon. The event horizon generates paradoxes that worry physicists, and the singularity of infinite density within the black hole worries them even more. And so many brave physicists have fought for centuries to prove that these monsters don’t exist. They hoped nature would step in to save us from the theoretical horror of ultimate gravitational collapse. One of our final hopes is the Planck star—a ball of energy at the heart of the black hole like frozen shards of the Big Bang. Let’s hope they’re real, for physics’ sake.

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Hosted by Matt O'Dowd

Written by Richard Dyer & Matt O'Dowd

Post Production by Leonardo Scholzer

Directed by Andrew Kornhaber

Associate Producer: Bahar Gholipour

Executive Producer: Andrew Kornhaber

Executive in Charge for PBS: Maribel Lopez

Director of Programming for PBS: Gabrielle Ewing

Assistant Director of Programming for PBS: Mike Martin

Spacetime is a production of Kornhaber Brown for PBS Digital Studios.

This program is produced by Kornhaber Brown, which is solely responsible for its content.

© 2026 PBS. All rights reserved.

End Credits Music by J.R.S. Schattenberg

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