ScienceThe BestieBeginner
How Black Holes Die course icon

How Black Holes Die

Like Duolingo, but for How Black Holes Die. Tomo turns the whole topic into a game you play five minutes a day, until it actually sticks.

For the part of you with thirty open tabs that never became anything.

10 bite-size levelsAbout 5 minutes each

Free forever · No credit card · iPhone & Android

Blinky the Black Hole
How Black Holes Die
with Blinky the Black Hole
10
Levels
2
Sections
5
Min/day
What you'll learn

Key ideas in How Black Holes Die

  • Black holes are not perfectly black
  • Vacuum is not truly empty but active
  • Energy can actually leave a black hole's vicinity
  • Pairs of particles are constantly appearing and disappearing
  • The glow is a sign that the black hole is interacting with the space around it
  • Pairs of particles normally cancel each other out instantly
  • The event horizon acts as a physical divider for particle pairs
  • Whether black holes are truly one-way traps for everything
  • Separation prevents the particles from vanishing back into the vacuum
  • The nature of 'empty' space near a black hole
  • One particle is lost forever while the other becomes a permanent resident of the universe
  • The sequence of events that separates a particle pair at the event horizon
  • Creating a permanent particle requires energy
  • The energy is 'taxed' from the black hole's own mass
  • The black hole gets slightly lighter every time a particle escapes
  • How an escaping particle causes the black hole to lose mass
Why not just Google it

You've tried the other tabs

Wikipedia

Thirty open tabs. Four facts you actually kept.

YouTube

You watched. You nodded. By Sunday it was gone.

ChatGPT

One answer, then back to scrolling.

Online courses

Eight weeks. You meant to finish. You didn't.

Tomo gives How Black Holes Die the Duolingo treatment: levels, streaks, and quick quizzes that test what you just learned. That game loop is what the tabs above never had, so it's the one you actually finish.

Try a question

Here's what playing it feels like

A real question from this course. Take your best guess.

The Glow in the Dark

What is the true nature of a vacuum in deep space?

Get it right to open this lesson and 9 more in the app.

Course map

Where How Black Holes Die takes you

Discover how the most permanent objects in the universe eventually evaporate into nothingness through the strange logic of Hawking Radiation.

  1. 1

    The Slow Leak

    • The Cosmic Leak
    • Shrinking and Speeding Up
  2. 2

    The Final Act

    • The Final Flash
    • The Information Mystery

2 sections · 4 units · 10 levels. Built to play, not to enroll.

How it's taught

You pick the voice

This course
The Bestie

How Black Holes Die is taught in the The Bestie style: your friend who just gets it. Want a different feel? In the app you can spin up the same topic in any of Tomo's teaching styles. Same facts, totally different vibe.

Start free

Start How Black Holes Die today.

Download Tomo, search How Black Holes Die, and play your first lesson in under a minute.