In all the years I’ve been talking about astronomy, I’ve always told people there was no such thing as a dumb question. And I meant it. That hasn’t stopped people from trying to come up with ’em though. Today’s deep question comes to us courtesy of my niece Oriana, who said she heard this one on TV: “How many corn dogs does it take to fill up a black hole?”

Well, Oriana, I bet you thought I wouldn’t try to answer that because it was too dumb. Truth to tell is you probably can’t come up with an exact number of how many corn dogs it would take to fill up a black hole, because, well… because the obvious answer is that you can’t fill up a black hole. The buggers just keep swallowing things up, getting bigger and bigger all the time. They’re weird animals that way. You can chuck all the corn dogs in that black hole that you want, and it’ll just keep sucking them down. Yeah, it’s a trick question, but what do you want from an advertising copywriter who probably thought it was a cute “astronomy” thing to ask in an ad about trucks?

You wanna know more about black holes? I have a scintillating discussion on my web page that invokes Star Trek, Sherlock Holmes, and the Hubble Space Telescope. Go over here and read it and then come back here and leave me a comment if you think there’s another way to answer the corn dogs-in-a-black-hole question!