• Question: What happens when you enter a black hole?

    Asked by nikki27 to Dilwar, Lou, Rachel, Simon, Susan on 18 Nov 2013. This question was also asked by dizzyg12.
    • Photo: Simon Langley-Evans

      Simon Langley-Evans answered on 18 Nov 2013:

      If you could get close enough to a black hole to enter it without being cooked by the x rays and other radiation that it throws out, your body would be subjected to massive gravitational pull. If you could approach a black hole about the size of Earth head first the top of your head would feel a massive gravitational pull and your body would be stretched longer and longer, until you achieved an infinite length. Your body would be stretched so thin that it would break down into individual atoms. You would be very, very dead.

    • Photo: Susan Skelton

      Susan Skelton answered on 19 Nov 2013:

      Hi nikki! Really great question, because no-one has ever been able to go and have a look and find out!

      Black holes are definitely some of the strangest places in the universe. We have no idea what is inside as they look pitch black. This is because they are so massive that even light cannot escape their gravity!

      If you were to get sucked in to a black hole, the massive gravitational field would stretch your body longer and longer….like toothpaste being squeezed out of a tube, until you would snap and be pulled apart and eventually become a stream of sub-atomic particles swirling into the hole. Because you would be stretched so long and thin, scientists call this process “spaghetti-fication”! 🙂

      Because your brain would break up into its constituent atoms almost instantly, you’d have little opportunity to soak in the scenery at the threshold of the black hole. But if you could have a good look around you, what you would see would be amazing!!…….

      As you would fall into the black hole, you would approach the speed of light. So the faster you move through space, the slower you would move through time. As you fall, there would be things that have been falling in front of you that would have experienced time slowing down even more than you have. So if you could look forward toward the black hole, you would see every object that has ever fallen into it in the past. And then if you look backwards, you’ll be able to see everything that will ever fall into the black hole behind you.

      So you would be able to see the entire history of that spot in the universe simultaneously, from the Big Bang all the way into the distant future, to the end of time!

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