• Question: Is there a way to explore black holes up close without getting killed?

    Asked by 999sptm42 to Ollie on 7 Mar 2018. This question was also asked by 562sptm42.
    • Photo: Alexander Burke

      Alexander Burke answered on 7 Mar 2018:

      Unfortunately not. It wouldn’t be very useful for humans to (physically) go near black holes since:
      1. They will likely be ripped apart, this is called spaghettification.
      2. Time slows down near black holes, whatever information we gain could be useless since humanity back on earth will have advanced by hundreds/thousands of years.
      3. You would never actually see a human cross go through a black hole. They would “freeze” near the event horizon (the point of no return) and it would take (from our perspective) an infinite amount of time for them to cross the horizon. This is due to the light coming from their bodies being “pulled back” towards the black hole and never reaching our eyes.

Comments

  • Photo: 773sptm35

    773sptm35 commented on :

    What is spaghettification

  • Photo: 392sptm35

    392sptm35 commented on :

    What is spaghettification

  • Photo: 773sptm35

    773sptm35 commented on :

    What is spaghettitifation

  • Photo: Guy

    Guy commented on :

    Near a black hole, there is a gravitational effect like a tide. The strength of the gravity increases very fast the nearer to the hole you get. The end of an object or person nearest the hole is getting pulled in much harder than the outer end, so things get pulled out into long strings (or just ripped apart).

  • Photo: Guy

    Guy commented on :

    If we, as engineers, wanted to build a machine that could somehow be immune to the gravitational tide near a black hole, then we’d need to understand gravity much better than anybody does today, even the scientists working on the theory. In fact, we’d have to understand the black hole so well that we wouldn’t need to go there to study it any more.

  • Photo: Ollie

    Ollie commented on :

    I agree with Guy! There are some really cool youtube videos on spaghettification if you’re interested! Have a look. Spaghettification literally means an object being stretched into a long string of spaghetti due to large tidal forces (as Guy described above).