• Question: What would happen if you go in a black hole

    Asked by Tamimah Khandakar to Andrew, Hina, Ian, Kathryn, Leah-Nani, Xu on 19 Jun 2018.
    • Photo: Leah-Nani Alconcel

      Leah-Nani Alconcel answered on 19 Jun 2018:

      This isn’t my area of expertise by a long shot, but I believe there is still quite a lot of argument over it. One argument says you would be incinerated to a crisp the moment you get pulled over the event horizon. Another says you could actually go through the event horizon and live a normal life. Personally I think it’s too big a risk to take and won’t be volunteering to try the experiment myself.

    • Photo: Kathryn Burrows

      Kathryn Burrows answered on 19 Jun 2018:

      One thing is for sure once you pass the event horizon you are never coming back! As not even light can escape the gravitational pull of a black hole.

      That said by the time you reach the black hole there will not be any of you left, at least nothing recognisably human, as you would have been pulled to shreds. Say you were falling in feet first, the pull of gravity at your feet would be so much greater than the pull at your head that you would be stretched out like spaghetti, in fact the field can be so strong that it is stronger than the electromagnetic forces holding the atoms in your body together so that your body is ripped apart atom by atom. In fact the gravitational field outside the black hole is so strong that you would probably be dead long before you actually enter the black hole.

    • Photo: Andrew Margetts-Kelly

      Andrew Margetts-Kelly answered on 19 Jun 2018:

      The long and short of it is you’re not coming back.

      What happens at the Event Horizon (that’s the edge of the black hole) has been the subject of much debate for a very long time. There is a theory for example, that any matter falling towards an event horizon will, because it takes an infinite amount of time to get there, be converted into energy because and some of it will escape as radiation.

      I’m not up to speed though with the current physical understanding of black holes other than the basics.

Comments