Written by Rahul Sahay
Edited by Sina Zamiri
Illustrated by Lillian Chan
Picture yourself drifting through the quiet vastness of space. The stars, distant and calm, glimmer all around you. Then, without warning, one of them seems to vanish. In its place lies an almost perfect circle of darkness, a mysterious void that looks like a cosmic vacuum cleaner, swallowing everything that gets too close.
Now imagine moving closer. You accelerate, drawn toward it faster and faster, and soon, things start to feel strange. Space itself begins to twist. Light bends in ways you’ve never seen before. You see streams of glowing gas and scattered debris being pulled inward, yet none of them ever seem to reach the darkness.
After some time, you find yourself at the edge of a black hole, standing at the threshold of the universe’s ultimate point of no return.
What you’ve reached is the event horizon, the invisible edge of a stellar-mass black hole, a black hole formed from a dying star, one of the most common kinds in the universe.¹ You might wonder how something like this could take the place of what once looked like a star. The truth is, it didn’t replace the star, it is the star; transformed into something far darker and denser.¹
That star was enormous, more than 20 times the mass of our Sun.¹ For millions of years, it burned bright, its nuclear fire pushing outward with just enough force to hold back gravity’s pull.¹ But when the fuel ran out, gravity took over.¹ The star’s core collapsed in on itself, triggering a supernova, a brief, blinding explosion so powerful it could outshine an entire galaxy.¹ Its outer layers were blown into space, leaving behind a core still heavier than three Suns.¹ With nothing left to stop it, the core kept collapsing and shrinking until it became what you’re standing before now, a black hole, whose gravity is so strong that not even light can escape.¹
But not all black holes are born from stars. Some are supermassive, sitting at the centers of galaxies, millions or even billions of times heavier than the Sun.²,⁵ They grow by consuming gas, dust, and sometimes entire stars, shaping galaxies around them through their immense pull.⁵ No matter how large, each black hole marks a place where gravity has gone to a point where the rules of the universe start to break down.³
Now that you’re at the event horizon, you must be wondering what’s going to happen now, and if you can still escape. Despite Black Holes being seen as cosmic whirlpools that just suck everything in, it is just like any other astronomically large entity, containing a gravitational force. Why it seems so much stronger is because the large mass of the Black Hole is concentrated in a relatively smaller volume of space.³
Technically, it is still possible for you to avoid falling into the Black Hole, but also not really. As you fall towards the Black Hole, the force of gravity increases incredibly steeply,³ and so by the time that you’re too close in vicinity to the event horizon, you are accelerating at an extremely high velocity.³ You’d need to move sideways fast enough to cause yourself to have an orbiting motion around the Black Hole, but you’d need to be moving sideways at near light speed,³ which isn’t humanly possible, and so there’s no avoiding the fall.³
You now feel an especially large pull on your feet. The gravitational force increases so fast as you get closer and closer that when you’re falling feet first, your feet are being exerted by a significantly greater force than your head.³ This causes your body to be stretched to the point where you turn into a noodle-shaped entity almost, a process scientists call spaghettification.²,³ Around you, light twists and bends, curving toward the black hole like ripples drawn toward the center.² The glowing gas and debris spiral inward, stretching into streaks of color before fading into darkness.³ You’re falling faster than anything can escape, yet to the rest of the universe, it looks as if you’ve frozen in time, due to the time dilation near the black hole.²,³
For centuries, the notion of a Black Hole and what would happen if you started falling into one has been debated between physicists,²,³ and the origin of Supermassive Black Holes remains a subject of confusion even after so long.⁴,⁵ Some believe that you would never actually fall into the black hole due to time slowing so much as you approach.² Researchers have come up with theories regarding the creation of Supermassive Black Holes that have to do with the collapse of giant stars made from huge clouds of gas, and baby black holes growing and merging into one.⁴,⁵
There has been so much unclarity in this area of Astronomy, but finally in 2019, efforts to make the unclear more clear were rewarded when an international collaboration, using the Event Horizon Telescope, a planet scale set of eight radio telescopes all work together to act as one Earth sized telescope, developed the first picture of a Black Hole in the heart of the galaxy Messier 87.²
Even now, scientists around the world continue to study these mysterious objects, trying to uncover what really happens if you fall toward one, and what black holes can teach us about the universe itself.
References
- NASA. What are black holes? https://www.nasa.gov/universe/what-are-black-holes/
- Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration. Astronomers capture first image of black hole. https://eventhorizontelescope.org/press-release-april-10-2019-astronomers-capture-first-image-black-hole
- Quick and Dirty Tips. What happens if you fall into a black hole? https://www.quickanddirtytips.com/qdtarchive/what-happens-if-you-fall-into-a-black-hole/
- Latif M, Ferrara A. The formation of massive black holes in the early Universe. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. 2017. https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2017MNRAS.464.2259F/abstract
- Encyclopaedia Britannica. Supermassive black hole. https://www.britannica.com/science/supermassive-black-hole