• Question: What would happen if you got sucked into a black hole ?

    Asked by anon-252493 to Stav, Sarah-May, Rosanna, Miriam, Katherine, Catherine, Anne, Claire on 7 May 2020. This question was also asked by anon-254590.
    • Photo: Stav Zalel

      Stav Zalel answered on 7 May 2020: last edited 7 May 2020 1:42 pm

      What happens when you fall into a black hole is one of the questions that physicists love asking. Not just because it is fun to think about, but also because any progress on this question would give us clues about the fundamental nature of our universe.

      Every black hole is surrounded by a boundary which separates it from the rest of the universe. We call this boundary “the horizon”. If you pass near the horizon, you can choose whether to just move around it and avoid going into the black hole (you will not get sucked in) or you can choose to cross it and enter the black hole.

      If you go inside, you will not be able to come back out because nothing can cross the horizon back from the black hole to the other side. People outside the black hole will be able to communicate things to you (for example, they can send you light signals), but you will not be able to reply. And although you might feel totally normal when you first enter the black hole you will eventually arrive at “the singularity”. At the singularity the forces of gravity become so strong that they will pull you into spaghetti (the science term is “spaghettification”!).

      Luckily, we can study black holes using mathematics, so we can learn about them without having to go inside them!

    • Photo: Miriam Hogg

      Miriam Hogg answered on 7 May 2020:

      There is one theory that the difference in gravity at different parts of your body would pull you at different rates so if you went in feet first your feet would get pulled faster than your head and you would strech out like a peice of spagetti. That theory is called ‘spagettification’.

      Inside the event horizon light can’t escape and goes in a circle so apparently you could theoretically see the back of your own head, which confuses my brain a lot. Time would also move a lot slower because of the intense gravity, it would feel like normal time for you, but if you could look out at the universe it might look like it was going at super speed. On the other side, if someone was watching you fall into a black hole it would appear to them as if you were moving slower and slower as you approached the event horizon, and most poeple think that an outside observer would never see the person actually fall in because the person would appear to be not moving.

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