Most images of black holes are illustrations. Here’s what our telescopes capture
Black holes are an excellent example for so called "cognitive metaphors".<p>Because we found no better analogy, we named them "holes" despite the fact that they are basically the opposite: an object with enormous mass.<p>This influences our thinking and our language when we discuss problems concerning black holes. We talk about "inside the black hole", "light cannot escape the black hole" or "spitting things out of the black hole".<p>I think it is really interesting how these cognitive metaphors can sometime limit our ability to think about a problem, because they often restrict the properties of the described thing to the properties of the analogy.