Step-by-step tutorial
Warning
Ferrofluid tends to be very messy, toxic if ingested, and irritating on sensitive skin, so be sure to use gloves when handling ferrofluid and have a grown up supervise.
Step 1
Gather your materials.
Step 2
Tape a magnet to the bottom of a round bottle.
Step 3
Fill a the bottle around halfway with vegetable glycerin.
Step 4
Add 2 tsps of ferrofluid into the bottle. The fluid should from spikes around the bottom.
Step 5
Fill the bottle the rest of the way with vegetable glycerin.
Step 6
Attach two magnets to the cork using string.
Step 7
Insert the magnets in the bottle and watch as the ferrofluid clings to them.
Step 8
Remove the magnet taped on the bottom.
Step 9
Admire your bottled Black Hole.
Learn more
This bottled black hole gets its look from ferrofluid, a liquid packed with teeny-tiny particles of magnetite, a magnetic iron mineral. The ferrofluid stretches into spikes along the magnet’s invisible field lines and creeps toward the dangling magnets, a lot like gas getting dragged toward a black hole. Out in space, gravity does the pulling. Many black holes form when a giant star runs out of fuel and collapses under its own weight, and Einstein’s math predicts all that matter gets crushed into an impossibly tiny point called a singularity. Once anything crosses the boundary called the event horizon, nothing can get back out, not even light, the fastest thing in the universe. Since no light escapes, the black hole itself is invisible, so scientists find them by watching how stars move around something they can’t see and by spotting the glow of super-heated gas swirling around it in a giant disk.
