A rendezvous with infinityĪs you fall toward the singularity, you're not cloaked in blackness. And you will hit that singularity in a finite amount of time.Ĭlock's ticking. Turn left, turn up, turn around, it doesn't matter - the singularity always remains in front of you. You simply must travel toward the singularity. Here, a single point - the singularity - lies in your future. Inside the event horizon of a black hole, this common-sense understanding breaks down. But no matter where you do (or don't) go in space, you must always travel into your future. Up? Left? A little bit of both? Neither? The choice is yours. Outside the black hole's event horizon, you can move in any direction in space you please. And the singularity lies in all your possible futures. Within the event horizon, nothing can stay still. For a giant one, at least a million times bigger than our sun, you have a handful of heartbeats to experience this mysterious corner of the universe.īut hit the singularity you must. For a small black hole (a few times the mass of the sun counts as "small") you can't even blink an eye. How long it takes to reach the singularity depends on the mass of the black hole. You have a few moments to enjoy the experience before you meet your inevitable demise, if "enjoy" is the right word. As hard as you fired your rockets, would find yourself no farther from the singularity. If you were to fall below this boundary and decided you had enough of this black hole exploration business, then too bad. This is the distance from the singularity where the gravitational pull is so extreme that nothing, not even light itself, can escape the black hole's clutches. It's simply defined as a particular distance from the singularity, the distance where if you fall below this threshold, you can't get out. The event horizon isn't a real, physical boundary. But if you felt like orbiting it at a safe distance, you most certainly could. All that's missing is the wonderful heat and light and warmth and radiation. Gravity is gravity and mass is mass - a black hole with the mass of, say, the sun will pull on you exactly the same as the sun itself. After all, it's just a massive object, pretty much like any other massive object. We can save a more realistic trip for another visit (assuming we'll survive this hypothetical journey into a black hole, which of course we won't).įrom a distance the black hole is surprisingly benign. Of course this is decidedly unrealistic, but it's still a fun story with plenty of cool physics to unpack. For the purposes of our adventure in this particular tale, I'm going to stick to the simplest possible scenario: a giant black hole with no electric charge and no spin whatsoever. There are many kinds of black holes: some big ones, some small ones, some with electric charges, some without, and some with rapid rotations and others more sedentary. First, we need to clear up some definitions.
0 kommentar(er)
