PHYSICS
WHAT WOULD HAPPEN IF YOU JUMPED INTO A BLACK HOLE? BY EMMA STAVELEY
Have you ever wondered what would happen to you if you decided to take a journey into the mysterious depths of a black hole? Well, aside from dying, some pretty interesting stuff would happen to you. To understand why these things happen, first you have to know what black holes are. Black holes are areas of space time where the gravity is so strong that nothing, not even light can escape. In terms of general relativity, when there is a mass that is extremely dense it warps the fabric of space time to a degree where a black hole is formed. Now, with space time bent to such an extent that the centre of the black hole has infinite density, your body would go through some pretty horrific consequences if you decided to jump in.
…the centre of the black hole has infinite density… As you approach the black hole, the gravity becomes increasingly strong. This happens to such an extent that, when falling feet first, you would begin to stretch. This is because the gravity at your feet is stronger than the gravity felt at your head, so your feet would accelerate at a faster rat and you would stretch.
This, believe it or not, is called spaghettification. So, stretching into a long, spaghetti shaped human you would continue towards the centre. Before long your body would snap in half and both halves would stretch until breaking point and so on and so forth until you have been broken up into tiny pieces which would all accelerate into the darkness of a black hole. Before you reach the event horizon, you would be able to see distorted shapes and colours as the light is bent severely. You wouldn’t be able to see anything beyond it, because the event horizon is the point of ‘no return,’ so the light cannot escape that point. So what if you watched someone else jump in? Outside the event horizon, time is moving at a normal rate, but as you get to the event horizon, things begin to get a little weird. Time effectively becomes infinite when observing from before the event horizon. Basically, if you were observing your friend falling into a black hole,
as they approached the event horizon they would appear to move extremely slowly, and ‘hover’ just before the horizon. Now, when you think about it, this is a kind of optical illusion. It doesn’t really take an infinite amount of time to cross the horizon, but to an observer it does. As your friend falls deeper and deeper into the black hole, the light takes longer and longer to reach you, until he reaches the event horizon and the light can’t reach you. his explains why you see them slowing down, and remain still as you can never actually see them cross the event horizon. So there you have it, the answer to a question I’m sure you spent hours agonizing over. N.B. The Absolute Zero team does not recommend that you jump into a black hole for research or recreational purposes. Emma Staveley