An expert at NASA has shared what it might look like to fall into a black hole.
It’s a question which many of us have asked ourselves and, hopefully, none of us will ever know the answer to from direct experience.
But just in case you were wondering there is now a video put together by an astrophysicist which gives an impression of how it might look.
That is of course assuming that you would be able to see what was going on amidst the weird process of ‘spaghettification’ where an object being sucked into the black hole would be ‘stretched’ out indefinitely.
Astrophysicist Jeremy Schnittman at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center worked on the video.
It shows what it might look like when someone passed the black hole’s event horizon.
This is effectively the point of no return where the gravitational pull of the black hole becomes too strong for them to be any hope of escape.
Scream if you want to go faster… (NASA)
Schnittman spoke about the video, explaining why he decided to make it.
He said: “People often ask about this, and simulating these difficulty-to-imagine processes helps me connect the mathematics of relativity to actual consequences in the real universe.”
In the end there were two scenarios that Schnittman decided to emulate in his videos, which he made using a NASA supercomputer.
He explained: “I simulated two different scenarios, one where a camera — a stand-in for a daring astronaut — just misses the event horizon and slingshots back out, and one where it crosses the boundary, sealing its fate.”
The gravitational pull over the event horizon is so strong that nothing can escape its pull – not even light.
Schnittman explained which sort of black hole would be the best to fall into.
Things aren’t looking great. (NASA)
And just to be clear, we don’t mean because you might survive, more than the end would be quicker.
He said: “If you have the choice, you want to fall into a supermassive black hole. Stellar-mass black holes, which contain up to about 30 solar masses, possess much smaller event horizons and stronger tidal forces, which can rip apart approaching objects before they get to the horizon.”
Not only that but you might even experience time differently if you were to get close enough to a black hole.
To an observer you might appear to never pass the event horizon even though you had.
And if you went on a trip where you were sling-shotted round by gravity then you would come back younger.
Don’t get your hopes though, as it would only be by around 36 minutes.
Topics: News, NASA, Science, US News, World News, Space
