• Question: what does a black hole have on the other side

    Asked by 949sptm42 to Ollie, Angus, Christine, Guy on 5 Mar 2018. This question was also asked by 655sptm42, 355sptm42.
    • Photo: Alexander Burke

      Alexander Burke answered on 5 Mar 2018:

      Unfortunately, I highly doubt we will ever find out. Due to the immense gravity of black holes, once an object passes the point of no return (the event horizon) then it cannot come back to us. When this happens we will never learn anything about the future of that object since the light from that object will take an infinite amount (unimaginably long) of time to reach us. From our view, that object will be lost forever. In theory, however, the fate of the object depends on whether the black hole is spinning on not. If the black hole is not spinning then, according to Einstein’s laws, there is absolutely nothing beyond the singularity (centre of the black hole) of the black hole. If an object falls into this sort of black hole it will be destroyed and pulverised to nothingness. This violates several laws of physics so we are lucky that all black holes spin! If an object falls into a spinning black hole then it will be consumed and then spat out into a completely different universe entirely. This is all theory though and we really don’t know if this happens in practice. It’s fun to sit and think about though =) .

    • Photo: Guy Rixon

      Guy Rixon answered on 5 Mar 2018:

      We don’t really know, because nobody has ever been through one to look and if they did (and somehow managed to survive), there’s no way back to tell anybody else. However…

      There are various theories that when a black hole forms, it creates a whole, separate universe on the far side. There’s an additional speculation that our own universe may have started that way. Lee Smollin wrote a book about it, “The Life Of The Cosmos”, in which he explores the idea that there’s a kind of evolutionary process such that each new universe is changed a little to make more black holes and so make more descendants: a bit like natural selection in animals. This is not proven science, but it’s interesting to think about.

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