Cone-shaped shadows emanating from the bright centre of galaxy IC 5063 could be cast by the dusty ring surrounding the supermassive black hole at its centre. Here, material falling into the hole piles up and eventually creates a new singularity.Īnd, crucially, this late singularity will not be as violent. If it’s rotating, a buckle in space-time, like a ruck in a carpet, will form roughly halfway between the horizon and the singularity. Things are better, however, if you fall into the hole long after it has formed. They would fragment into droplets, destroying any concept of past and future. The tidal forces as you approached the singularity would be so powerful and unpredictable that not only would you be torn apart, but so would space and time. If you fell into a supermassive black hole soon after it formed, you would reach the singularity within a few hours. You can’t avoid it just as you can’t avoid tomorrow. This explains why the point of infinite density, or ‘singularity’, at the centre is unavoidable. Thus, the way to the centre of the hole is not a direction in space, but a direction in time. Past the event horizon, space-time is so distorted that space becomes time and time becomes space. This is because the interiors of black holes evolve with time. If you could indeed survive the passage through a black hole’s ‘event horizon’ – the point of no return for in-falling matter and light – what you would see and what would happen to you would depend on precisely when you fell into the hole. Credit: EHT Collaboration A matter of space and time The image of the supermassive black hole in galaxy M87 was captured by the Event Horizon Telescope and revealed to the world in April 2019. Why does it take light from galaxies so long to reach us?. What would happen if you fell into a black hole?īlack holes are one of the most mind-blowing cosmological concepts we know of, and they've certainly been thrust into our consciousness in recent years through detections of gravitational waves and the incredible first image of a black hole, captured in galaxy M87.īut what would happen if you fell into a black hole? What would you see? Could you survive?
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