Remember the last time you tripped and fell in a hole. Do you remember what it felt like when you realized you wouldn't be able to stop yourself from falling, wouldn't be able to do anything other than brace yourself for impact? Now imagine that, but on a cosmic scale - you're falling towards an incredibly tiny but impossibly dense object, so heavy it distorts the fabric of space and time around it - a black hole!

NASA defines a black hole as "an astronomical object with a gravitational pull so strong that nothing, not even light, can escape it." This description is wonderfully dramatic, but what does it even mean that light cannot escape? To start with, lets get a basic understanding of gravity and stars.