• Question: If you enter a black hole where would it take you?

    Asked by Mega Reyquaza to Ry, Scott, Maggie, Hannah, Daniel on 8 Nov 2017. This question was also asked by finlay, Izzywizzy.
    • Photo: Ry Cutter

      Ry Cutter answered on 8 Nov 2017:

      You wouldn’t really travel anywhere… unless you’ve accidentally fallen into a wormhole by mistake.
      From the outside it would look like you’re stuck in time. But on the inside you would stretch out long and thin in a process called spaghettification. I think it would be quite painful :S
      Great question!
      Ryan

    • Photo: Daniel Williams

      Daniel Williams answered on 8 Nov 2017:

      So, it’s hard to say, precisely. We don’t really understand what the inside of black hole looks like, because there’s a boundary around the outside called the “event horizon” that light can’t travel back out of, which stops us seeing the inside.

      We think that in the middle of a black hole there’s an infinitely dense “object” called a singularity, which doesn’t have any volume. If you fell into the black hole you’d probably just crash into this, and get crushed… infinitely. Not the most pleasant trip really.

      If the black hole is spinning very fast it’s possible that the singularity would get stretched out into a ring. In that case, if you jump in at just the right angle, you might manage to fall through the centre of the ring, and start orbiting it.

      There are some theories about how there might be something on the far-side of the black hole which is called an “Einstein-Rosen bridge” or a wormhole. Making one of those is definitely difficult, and maybe impossible however!

    • Photo: Hannah Middleton

      Hannah Middleton answered on 8 Nov 2017:

      Just like Daniel said, your mass would probably just be compressed down and added to the total mass of the black hole! But as we can’t get any information out from the event horizon, we can’t know for sure what happens!

    • Photo: Maggie Lieu

      Maggie Lieu answered on 8 Nov 2017:

      Some people think its a portal to another Universe, that’s if you believe in multi-verses!

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