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Season 2026 · Episode 9 of 11 Aired May 21, 2026

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

Thu, May 21, 2026
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Next: S2026 E10

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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Airs

Thu, May 21, 2026

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PBS Space Time

433 episodes

Episode

S2026 · E9

in PBS Space Time