![]() "Your friends at home will see you getting closer and closer to the event horizon, but will never see you cross. This is true for both the stellar and supermassive black holes," he said. "That's because the messages from you are taking longer and longer to climb out of the black hole's gravity. "They probably won't notice anything unusual, except that the communications from home will become strange-it will seem like they aren't keeping up to date on your travels." "The astronaut crossing the supermassive black hole should enjoy the trip," Starkman said. iStockĪpproaching a supermassive black hole, on the other hand, would be surprisingly peaceful at first, according to Farr, and a free falling astronaut may even be able to reach and cross its event horizon, likely without noticing anything particularly special. ![]() Anyone falling into a black hole would eventually be torn apart by the extreme gravitational forces. Stock image: Artist's illustration of an astronaut falling into a black hole. In fact, the tidal forces around a stellar-mass black hole would be strong enough to spaghettify the astronaut and their spacecraft likely from a few hundred kilometers out. "Because the event horizon is so much closer to a small black hole than to a big black hole, the effect will be much larger for a small black hole," Glenn Starkman, a physicist and astronomer at Case Western Reserve University, told Newsweek. "Tidal forces are felt by an object when the force of gravity it experiences from some massive object is stronger on one of its sides than the other."ĭue to the extreme tidal forces, the astronaut will experience an effect aptly named " spaghettification"-essentially, they would be stretched out vertically, like spaghetti dough being stretched by a chef (but much more violent). "A stellar-mass black hole has such extreme tidal forces outside of its event horizon (an astronaut falling feet first would feel stronger gravity at their feet than their head) that our astronaut would be torn apart well before reaching the event horizon," Farr said. ![]() Perhaps counterintuitively, supermassive black holes may be safer to approach than stellar mass ones-at least in the short term. If you came too close to a black hole, you would be sent into a free fall towards the center, with the gravitational forces increasing as you get closer, creating a pulling force on your body.īut the experience of an astronaut approaching a black hole's event horizon, very much depends on its size. For a supermassive black hole the size of the one at the center of our galaxy, this figure is far larger-around 12 million kilometers (7.4 million miles). "This is the point at which the curvature of space caused by the black hole is so extreme that not even light, the fastest moving particles in the universe, can go anywhere but center of the black hole once it passes it."Īccording to Farr, the event horizon for a typical "stellar mass" black hole, say 10 times the mass of our sun, is about 30 kilometers (19 miles) from its center. "The 'point of no return' for black holes is the event horizon," Ben Farr, a physicist and gravitational wave astronomer at the University of Oregon, told Newsweek. What would happen, and how close is too close? So, let's imagine a hypothetical situation in which humanity has mastered interstellar travel (the closest black holes are thought to be thousands of light-years away) and an astronaut strayed too close to a black hole, either in a spacecraft or while spacewalking. What Would Happen if You Came Too Close to a Black Hole? Supermassive black holes can have masses ranging from millions to billions of solar masses. ![]() Stellar black holes tend to have a mass several times larger than our sun. The event horizon is named as such because it is impossible to observe any event taking place inside it.īlack holes come in two main size classes: stellar and supermassive (although recent research has revealed there may also be an intermediate class). Surrounding this is a region known as the event horizon-the boundary beyond which nothing can escape due the extreme gravitational pull. What would happen if you fell into a black hole? iStockĪt the center of a black holes lies the singularity-a one-dimensional point where gravity is predicted to be infinite and the laws of physics as we know them break down.
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