What happens if something goes into a black hole

Beyond the event horizon lies a truly minuscule point called a singularity, where gravity is so intense that it infinitely curves space-time itself. This is where the laws of physics, as we know them, break down, meaning all theories about what lies beyond are just speculation.

Today, black holes are considered an ordinary part of stellar evolution, and astronomers suspect our Milky Way galaxy holds millions of them alone. Black holes come in different varieties and can be modeled with different levels of complexity, like whether or not they spin or have an electrical charge. So if you jumped into one, your exact fate might depend on which sort of black hole you choose.

At the simplest level, there are three kinds of black holes: stellar-mass black holes , supermassive black holes and intermediate-mass black holes.

Stellar-mass black holes form when very large stars finish burning their fuel and collapse into themselves. Supermassive black holes live in the centers of most galaxies, and likely grow to their extreme sizes — up to tens of billions of times more massive than our Sun — by consuming stars and merging with other black holes.

Intermediate-mass black holes are still mysterious, and only a few suspected examples have been discovered, but astronomers think they may form through a similar process of accretion, just on a smaller scale. Stellar-mass black holes may be puny in comparison to their bigger cousins, but they actually boast more extreme tidal forces just beyond their event horizons.

This difference occurs thanks to a property of black holes that would likely surprise some casual observers. Smaller black holes actually have a more dramatic gravitational gradient than supermassive ones. In other words, you only have to fall a very short distance to experience an extremely noticeable difference in gravity.

This is because the black hole's gravity compresses your body horizontally while pulling it like taffy in the vertical direction. If you jumped into the black hole feet first, the gravitational force on your toes would be much stronger than that pulling on your head. Each bit of your body would also be elongated in a slightly different direction.

You would literally end up looking like a piece of spaghetti. And this scenario isn't entirely based on theory and speculation, either. The star was stretched out and shredded, causing some of the material to fall beyond the event horizon, while the rest was flung back out into space. In contrast to falling into a stellar-mass black hole, your experience plunging into a supermassive or intermediate-mass black hole would be slightly less nightmarish.

Though the end result, a horrible death, would still be your fate, you might actually make it all the way to the event horizon and manage to start falling inside the singularity while still alive. In this case, at least in theory, you could see out into surrounding space. But no one would be able to see you once you passed beyond the event horizon. Even if you were holding a flashlight and tried to shine it out, the light would fall back down into the singularity with you.

Meanwhile, you'd see that everything within the event horizon was warped by extreme gravitational forces, thanks to an effect astronomers call gravitational lensing. Not to mention the wild time dilation effects.

Of course, no matter what type of black hole you fall into, you're ultimately going to get torn apart by the extreme gravity. No material, especially fleshy human bodies, could survive intact. But physical forces dictate that you would be crunched down not just to cells or even atoms, but to a perfect sea of energy, devoid of any hint of the object you previously were. But many scientists think that possibility exists only on paper, and that the real world is too messy and unstable to support wormholes.

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No light of any kind, including X-rays, can escape from inside the event horizon of a black hole, the region beyond which there is no return. NASA's telescopes that study black holes are looking at the surrounding environments of the black holes, where there is material very close to the event horizon. Matter is heated to millions of degrees as it is pulled toward the black hole, so it glows in X-rays. The immense gravity of black holes also distorts space itself, so it is possible to see the influence of an invisible gravitational pull on stars and other objects.

In , researchers discovered a black hole named CID that grew much more quickly than its host galaxy. Image credit: M. A stellar-mass black hole, with a mass of tens of times the mass of the Sun, can likely form in seconds, after the collapse of a massive star.

These relatively small black holes can also be made through the merger of two dense stellar remnants called neutron stars. A neutron star can also merge with a black hole to make a bigger black hole, or two black holes can collide.

Mergers like these also make black holes quickly, and produce ripples in space-time called gravitational waves. More mysterious are the giant black holes found at the centers of galaxies — the "supermassive" black holes, which can weigh millions or billions of times the mass of the Sun. It can take less than a billion years for one to reach a very large size, but it is unknown how long it takes them to form, generally. The research involves looking at the motions of stars in the centers of galaxies.

These motions imply a dark, massive body whose mass can be computed from the speeds of the stars. The matter that falls into a black hole adds to the mass of the black hole. Its gravity doesn't disappear from the universe. There is no way a black hole would eat an entire galaxy.

The gravitational reach of supermassive black holes contained in the middle of galaxies is large, but not nearly large enough for eating the whole galaxy. It certainly wouldn't be good! But what we know about the interior of black holes comes from Albert Einstein's General Theory of Relativity.

For black holes, distant observers will only see regions outside the event horizon, but individual observers falling into the black hole would experience quite another "reality. At the same time, the immense gravity of the black hole would compress you horizontally and stretch you vertically like a noodle, which is why scientists call this phenomenon no joke "spaghettification.

Fortunately, this has never happened to anyone — black holes are too far away to pull in any matter from our solar system. But scientists have observed black holes ripping stars apart , a process that releases a tremendous amount of energy. The Sun will never turn into a black hole because it is not massive enough to explode. Instead, the Sun will become a dense stellar remnant called a white dwarf. But if, hypothetically, the Sun suddenly became a black hole with the same mass as it has today, this would not affect the orbits of the planets, because its gravitational influence on the solar system would be the same.

So, Earth would continue to revolve around the Sun without getting pulled in — although the lack of sunlight would be disastrous for life on Earth.