![]() ![]() 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. “So although I’m keen on space flight, I’m not going to try that.Stock image: Artist's illustration of an astronaut falling into a black hole. But you couldn’t come back to our Universe.” “The hole would need to be large and if it was rotating it might have a passage to another Universe. “The existence of alternative histories with black holes suggests this might be possible,” Prof Hawking said. Prof Hawking also offered compelling thoughts about where things that fall into a black hole could eventually wind up. For all practical purposes the information is lost,” he said. “This information is emitted in the quantum fluctuations that black holes produce, albeit in chaotic, useless form. “Thus they contain all the information that would otherwise be lost.” “The idea is the super translations are a hologram of the ingoing particles,” he explained. He formulated the idea that information is stored in the form of what are known as super translations. “The information is not stored in the interior of the black hole as one might expect, but in its boundary – the event horizon,” Prof Hawking said. Not even light can escape them, since their gravitational pull is so infinitely powerful. Instead, it’s permanently encoded in a two-dimensional hologram at the surface of the black hole’s event horizon.Īs we understand them, black holes are regions of space-time where stars, having exhausted their fuel, collapse under their own gravity, creating a bottomless pit that swallows anything approaching too closely. Not even if it gets sucked into a black hole.īut Prof Hawking’s idea is that the information doesn’t make it inside the black hole at all. And according to the laws of quantum mechanics, this information should never entirely disappear, no matter what happens to it. The presentation was made at the Hawking Radiation Conference, which was co-hosted by the Nordita institute and the University of North Carolina.Įverything in our world is encoded with quantum mechanical information. Is it destroyed, as our understanding of general relativity would predict? If so, that would violate the laws of quantum mechanics.Īccording to a new idea proposed yesterday by Prof Hawking at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, black holes don’t actually swallow and destroy physical information. One of the most baffling questions facing a generation of physicists is what happens to the information about the physical state of things that are swallowed up by black holes? Artist’s impression of a black hole and a normal star. ![]()
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