To be clear: this material is still outside the event horizon which is why we can still see it. Such radiation is generated when the black hole is feasting on new material. They can readily outshine the rest of their host galaxy combined. Quasars - objects at the hearts of distant galaxies powered by black holes - are supremely bright. Interestingly, black holes are not necessarily black. But don’t lose too much sleep, we’d have to be unfortunate to “hit” a black hole in the first place - and we might live on holographically after the crunch anyway. In this case, it could be some time before disaster struck. We would be pulled apart.Įqually, we might not even notice if a truly supermassive black hole swallowed us below its event horizon as everything would appear as it once was, at least for a small period of time. As such, the doom of the entire planet would be at hand. The edge of the Earth closest to the black hole would feel a much stronger force than the far side. What would happen, hypothetically, if a black hole appeared out of nowhere next to Earth? The same gravitational effects that produced spaghettification would start to take effect here. For a distant observer outside the event horizon of the black hole, it would appear that we progressively slow down and then fade away over time. Yet, for a supermassive black hole, such as the one thought to reside at the center of our galaxy, an object could readily sink below the event horizon before becoming spaghetti, at a distance of many tens of thousands of kilometers from its center. For an “ordinary” black hole that has been produced by the collapse of a high mass star, this could be several hundred kilometers away from the event horizon - the point beyond which no information can escape a black hole. The exact point at which these forces become too much to bear will depend critically on the mass of a black hole. See also: Theoretical astrophysicist Katie Mack talks black holes, dark matter, and the end of the universe. Hence, your body, or any other object, such as Earth, will start to resemble spaghetti long before it hits the center of the black hole. The net result is not only an elongation of the body overall, but also a thinning out (or compression) in the middle. This will cause parts of the body toward the edges to be brought inwards. Worse than that, your arms, by virtue of the fact that they’re not at the center of your body, will be attracted in a slightly different (vector) direction than your head is. Since your feet are physically closer to the black hole, they will feel a stronger gravitational pull towards it than your head will. Imagine that you are headed feet first towards a black hole. This effect is caused due to a gravitational gradient across your body. In brief, if you stray too close to a black hole, then you will stretch out, just like spaghetti. One of the best-known effects of a nearby black hole has the imaginative title of “Spaghettification”. Spaghetti: Nice to eat, but not nice to get turned into. The very definition of a black hole is that it has its mass concentrated into a vanishingly small volume - the “singularity.” And it is the mass of the black hole - and the huge gravitational forces that its mass generates -which does the “damage” to nearby objects. Of these parameters, mass is arguably the most significant. This is known as the “ no hair theorem.” Put simply: no matter how hairy or complex an object you throw into a black hole, it will get reduced down (or shaved) to its mass, charge, and spin. Indeed, these are the only three parameters that an outside observer can ever know about since all other information about anything that goes into making up a black hole is lost. There are three properties of a black hole that are (in principle) measurable: their mass, their spin (or angular momentum), and their overall electronic charge. Invariably though, the one item that is almost assured to come up are the largely gruesome ways in which black holes might theoretically affect human beings and the Earth itself. Many of the questions I am asked regard how “true” science fiction concerning black holes might be, and whether worm holes, such as those featured in Stargate, are real or not. And interest regarding black holes will surely grow now that gravitational waves have been discovered. Black holes have long been a source of much excitement and intrigue.
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