• Question: If a black hole sucks you up, where does it lead you?

    Asked by issi759 to Alessandro, Angela, Claudia, Marina, Phil on 12 Mar 2013. This question was also asked by catterack662.
    • Photo: Alessandro Guazzi

      Alessandro Guazzi answered on 12 Mar 2013:

      Don’t get sucked up by a black hole!!! Black holes are bodies which have such a concentrated mass that they get a very very very strong gravitational field. So strong in fact that not even light can escape it! This means that if you and your friend were on opposite sides of a black hole and your friend shone a torch at you, you wouldn’t see it because all the light would actually fall into the black hole!!!
      If you were to fall in the black hole you would be stretched into spaghetti and eventually pulled apart! But people seeing you back home would think this would take an infinite amount of time, due to a theory known as “gravitational time-dilation”. This is because its as if time freezes around and inside a black hole, so you’d be stuck as a spaghetti for ever, give or take a couple of eons!

Comments