For the Public

Day	Tuesday, May 19th 2026
Hour	19:30–20:30
Place	Brno Observatory and Planetarium
Address	Kraví hora 2, Brno (Google Maps link)

Andrea M. Ghez, recipient of the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery of a supermassive compact object at the center of our Galaxy, will deliver the public lecture “From the Possibility to the Certainty of a Supermassive Black Hole” at the Brno Observatory and Planetarium on Tuesday, May 19th 2026, from 19:30. You can reserve seats at https://www.brnoid.cz/cs/hvezdarna-vstupenky?e=32234.

Day	Monday - Friday, May 18th - May 22nd 2026
Hour	all day
Place	Brno city center
Address	Moravian Square (Google Maps link)

Discover black holes, both the smallest and the largest in the Universe. What is their origin? What can we see and how would we feel when we would find ourselves in the direct vicinity of them? Why do we say that black holes have no hair? The photo exhibition answers these and many more puzzling questions about these black monsters.

Day	Monday - Friday, May 18th - May 22nd 2026
Hour	all day
Place	different places in Brno

Imagine that you take the planet Jupiter, which is 318 times more massive than Earth, and compress it into a sphere about six meters in diameter. In that case, it would collapse in on itself—and form a small black hole. And you would place this black hole in the middle of Freedom Square in Brno (Náměstí Svobody). What would follow? Death. If you were sitting at one of the café gardens, standing in line for ice cream at a street stall, or waiting for a tram, a much greater force would begin to act on your chest than on your back, so that within a fraction of a second you would be transformed from a human being into a stream of ionized gas. The entire Earth, 13 000 kilometers in diameter—with all its people, including those on the International Space Station—would begin to be disrupted by the six-meter black hole. The combination of extreme gravitational acceleration and destructive tidal forces would, within seconds, turn it into a cloud of plasma, forming a hellish vortex—a so-called accretion disk—orbiting the destroyer we created at what would no longer be Freedom Square. The Earth’s material, heated to hundreds of millions of degrees Celsius and thus radiating across the entire electromagnetic spectrum—especially in hard X-rays—would, over the following minutes and hours, fall into the gravitational well of the black hole. Some of this matter would never make it in and would instead be blown away at enormous speeds into the desolate expanse of space. And that would be all. A brief and extraordinarily violent agony of the entire planet, a definite six-meter full stop to the history of humankind. Brno would cease to exist so quickly that no one would even have time to lament their unfinished fried cheese.