To an outside observer, this process would take billions of years, but inside, thanks to the enormous gravitational pull, time would be speeded up, taking you mere milliseconds. Alternatively, you could wait for a black hole to turn into a white one. Fall into one, and you will, eventually, get thrown out the other end where space-time bounces back outwards, vomiting you up with it. One idea is that every black hole is connected to a white one via an inter-dimensional tunnel known as a wormhole. Just as black holes allow nothing to escape their pull, white holes can’t hold anything together. There is one possible way you could make it back out, through a hypothetical object called a white hole. Unfortunately, you wouldn’t be able to escape to tell anyone what you’d seen. If you have a choice, your best bet is to fall into a large one: their gravity is bigger, but the stretching tidal force is less, meaning you might just live to tell the tale. Black holes come in a range of sizes, from as small as a single atom to a million times the mass of the sun. Is there a way to survive a black hole? Well, sort of. You would still die a pretty terrible death if you fell into a fuzzball like this, but instead of becoming part of nothing, you would become part of this bundle of strings. If that’s the case, black holes aren’t really black holes at all, but fuzzy balls of tangled string. One way to do that is with string theory, which says that matter isn’t made of fundamental particles, but instead is composed of tiny strings. We need a unified theory to reconcile the two. General relativity states that when matter falls into a black hole, information is destroyed, but quantum mechanics says that can’t happen. This is where quantum physics comes into play, but quantum theory and General relativity don’t really get along. Once inside the black hole, it gets a bit harder to work out what happens, perhaps unsurprisingly, because general relativity’s equations fail catastrophically here at the black hole’s centre, known as its singularity. If you fell in feet first, your ankles would stretch away from your knees before your neck elongated into a strand of pasta. Beyond here gravity increases so quickly that it wouldn’t just crush you but pull apart every part of your body at different speeds, resulting in what physicists delightfully call “spaghettification”. Any further, and you will cross the event horizon, the line where the black hole’s gravity is too large to resist. Then, a looming darkness would wash over you and the surrounding stars would start to distort and bend. As you circle down the drain of this cosmic plughole all the photons being pulled alongside you would create a stream of blinding light. If you were unfortunate enough to get sucked into a black hole, it would be a spectacular, if devastating thing. Pretty amazing, huh? And there’s even more exciting research happening all the time. On the picture we can see a bright ring of material circling the black hole itself, silhouetted in the centre. Then in 2019, we managed to photograph a black hole for the first time, by using observatories around the world to turn Earth into one giant radio telescope. These ripples were first detected in 2015 by an incredibly sensitive experiment called LIGO, proving Einstein right. The theory also predicted that when black holes collide, they send out ripples in the fabric of space-time, called gravitational waves. The existence of black holes was predicted by Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity, which states that matter warps space and time, creating what we call gravity. If an evil alien empire decided to squash Earth down, it would form a black hole about the size of a peanut. Essentially any object sufficiently compressed can be a black hole. To find out, we need to know more about black holes.īlack holes are objects so massive and dense that not even beams of light, the fastest things in the universe, can escape their gravitational pull. Could you survive? Maybe, but it gets pretty weird. Before you know it, you have entered a black hole. It starts out faint, but gets stronger, pulling you towards an empty region of the sky. It’s quiet and cold, serene but slightly terrifying. Video transcript: Science with Sam: What is a black hole? And could you survive one?
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