Despite films such as Disney's The Black Hole showing objects anywhere near the black hole being sucked into it, this effect is a myth. To be hopelessly pulled in, you'd have to be close enough to cross its Schwarzschild radius, the point at which even light cannot escape.

If our sun were to experience a supernova explosion to create a black hole, we would remain in orbit around it as if the sun were still there. (Of course, in this event we'd have bigger things than a black hole to worry about, such as the loss of life-sustaining light and heat.)

Scientists classify black holes into two category types: stellar-mass black holes (having the mass of up to about 15 of our suns) and galaxy-mass black holes (having the mass of up to 100 billion of our suns).

Black holes are invisible, and cannot be seen in photographs taken by our most powerful telescopes. This is because if light were near enough to illuminate the hole, it would instead be sucked in and not make it back to us to reveal the black hole.

Worm holes, which would supposedly allow you to travel into a black hole and be spit out into another location or even time period, do not exist outside of Star Trek and other sci-fi works. Although possible under Einstein's theory of general relativity, scientists discount their existence as extremely unlikely and have never found evidence of any.

The number of black holes known to exist in observable galaxies depends on which set of criteria you accept for proving a black hole's existence. Jerome Orosz, assistant professor of astronomy at San Diego State University, documents 20 verified black holes at his website.