• Question: Do you think that a blackhole is an entrance to a new dimension or universe?

    Asked by anon-267416 on 6 Nov 2020.
    • Photo: Joshua McAteer

      Joshua McAteer answered on 6 Nov 2020:

      I don’t think black holes are entrances to other universes, but if they were, they would be very annoying entrances. Black holes bend and twist spacetime so much that as you get closer to them time slows down for you and the closer you get the more it slows. You would never be able to reach the centre because time slows down so much.

      Interestingly time slows down whenever you are near a massive object. GPS satellites, which have very accurate clocks, need to be adjusted for this in order to keep the exact time as they are further away from the Earth than we are.

      https://www.cfa.harvard.edu/seuforum/bh_whatare.htm this website from Harvard University has some more information about black holes

    • Photo: Katherine Manfred

      Katherine Manfred answered on 6 Nov 2020:

      Oooh, great question! Black holes are fascinating because we can’t really study what happens inside them so we can use our imaginations 🙂 I think you can imagine all sorts of things inside/on the other side of a black hole and no one can tell you that you’re wrong because we just don’t know!

    • Photo: Liza Sazonova

      Liza Sazonova answered on 7 Nov 2020: last edited 7 Nov 2020 9:49 pm

      We still really don’t know how black holes work, but you’ve probably heard of a /wormhole/ in sci-fi movies before: a tunnel that lets you get from one place in the Universe to a completely different one. A wormhole is just like a black hole that pierces through two sheets of spacetime letting you get out on the other side. We’ve never seen one but they are theoretically possible!
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      There are also even crazier things that are theoretically possible (and some scientists work on them). There is a theoretical “white hole” – basically be the opposite side of a black hole, and very simplistically it could lead into a “parallel” Universe. Again, we’ve never seen such a thing, but here’s a cool video by PBS spacetime on them: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S4aqGI1mSqo
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      Overall, we really don’t know anything about these exotic things in the Universe, but it’s exciting to think about it sometimes 🙂

    • Photo: Daisy Shearer

      Daisy Shearer answered on 8 Nov 2020:

      Hmmm… this is a tough one! I don’t think they are personally, but that doesn’t mean that it isn’t a possibility. We still don’t know much about black holes but lots of astrophysicists are trying to understand them better so maybe you could help us understand more about them one day! 🌌

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