What happens if you fall into a black hole

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

If an astronaut approaches a black hole, his prospects are not very bright.

In short, he will die. More detailed - it is not known exactly what will happen. Science can only speculate. But there will be nothing particularly pleasant, believe me.

At a respectful distance, a black hole behaves like a star of similar mass - you can enter a stable orbit around it and rotate there for years. According to scientists, even inhabited planets can exist there. But the closer you get to the hole, the more problems there will be.

Radiation will kill a person

If you believe that a black hole will harm a person only when he crosses the event horizon (the border around the hole, because of which even light cannot return), then you are mistaken. Difficulties will begin much earlier, and literally deadly.

Black holes are rarely alone. As a rule, they are surrounded by a huge pile of matter - gas, which was left after the hole was bitten by some star. Gas flies in orbit at a tremendous speed, so it has monstrous kinetic energy and heats up to gigantic temperatures.

This rapidly spinning and incineratingly hot thing around a black hole is called an accretion disk.

Interstellar viewers know what an accretion disk should look like. The black hole itself is invisible, since it absorbs any light that falls on it, but the swirl of matter around it can be seen. It is the accretion disk that is the glowing orange thing captured by the telescopes of the Event Horizon Telescope project in April 2019.

The accretion discs of black holes emit powerful electromagnetic radiation. The energy of X-rays and gamma rays is a million million times higher than that of visible light.

In addition, theoretically, the black hole itself can also emit Hawking radiation. True, astrophysicists are not yet sure about this, and the radiation power is negligible.

All these streams of charged particles, which the black hole scatters for hundreds of light years around itself, are unlikely to add health. The celestial body will finish off a person even on approach with ordinary radiation, without resorting to violations of the topology of space and distortions of time.

It will be burned by the matter of the accretion disk

Suppose the astronaut took care of radiation safety in advance - for example, put on a one-meter-thick lead-lined coat over a spacesuit. And, determined to find out what is in the mysterious depths of the black hole, continues to free fall towards it.

But another obstacle awaits the researcher, namely: the accretion disk already familiar to us. It consists of a very hot gas.

The disk heats up when gas particles collide with each other, making circles at breakneck speed around the black hole. Kinetic energy transforms into thermal energy, and so it goes well - matter near an average black hole can heat up to millions or even trillions of kelvin. This is slightly higher than, for example, the temperature of our Sun - 5 778 K at the surface, 15 million K at the core.

Probably, it is not worth reminding that it is unsafe to fly through streams of incandescent plasma. If a person is not killed by radiation, then a high temperature.

In general, the accretion disks of supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies are among the brightest objects in space. They are called "quasars". The hottest of them all, J043947.08 + 163415.7, roasts like 600 trillion normal yellow dwarfs like the Sun, if they conspired and spoke at once.

Periodically, by the way, black holes send into the Universe relativistic jets, or jets, - plasma streams at a near-light speed, usually in pairs, directed from the poles in opposite directions.

Astrophysicists are still debating why this is happening, but it looks like the magnetic fields around the hole are doing something interesting with the gas in the accretion disk. The jet can erupt continuously for 10 to 100 million years.

So, falling on a black hole, a person must avoid its poles, so as not to fall under the relativistic jets.

It spaghettizes

In view of the above, it is probably best to travel to a black hole without an accretion disk. These also happen - if there are no stars in the neighborhood from which you can pump gas. That is, the hole has already swallowed them all safely.

For example, the black hole in the center of the Markarian 1018 galaxy has sucked in all the matter around it and was left without gas nearby. Astrophysicists call such holes starving. Poor things.

Or the supermassive hole Sagittarius A in the center of our Milky Way - it has an extremely small, imperceptible disk 1.

2.. That is why it is so difficult to keep an eye on her.

In general, it is quite possible to approach the event horizon of a black hole without colliding with streams of hot plasma.

The problems that the astronaut will have next will depend on the size of the black hole.

If a person falls on an object that has a mass of, say, about one solar mass (332,946 times the mass of the Earth), then this is what happens.

As we approach this interesting celestial body, the force of gravity with which it affects a person will also increase. At a certain distance from the hole, it turns out that the gravity on the legs will be many times greater than the gravity on the head. This difference is called "tidal force".

The results of the influence of this force are described by physicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson in the book "Death in a black hole and other small cosmic troubles."

First, the tidal forces of the black hole will tear the astronaut in half exactly in the middle of the body (if, of course, he falls into the hole like a soldier, and not sideways). Then he will tear his legs and torso in half. Then again. And so in a geometric progression, until even the atoms from which the victim is made decay into elementary particles. Then all this stream of particles will be beyond the event horizon.

The earth also creates a tidal force on your body, but not enough to tear you apart, so don't worry.

That's all. The phenomenon is jokingly called "spaghettification". Usually, the tidal forces of black holes will spaghettize stars, but they will cope with humans as well.

However, there is one caveat.

Something terrible will happen, but we will not know what exactly

Tidal forces, as Neil Tyson explains, increase the more the size of the object in relation to the distance to the center of the hole. This means that a medium-sized black hole will tear the astronaut to pieces and split into atoms even on approach.

But if the black hole is massive enough and with a huge radius, its tidal forces will begin to stretch the traveler after he crosses the event horizon.

At the same time, probably, a person can even survive, says physicist Leo Rodriguez, because the event horizon is not a physical barrier, but simply the boundary of the gravitational effect of a black hole, on which even light cannot escape from it.

Just before falling over the horizon, the traveler may have time to see how all the light of the surrounding stars is distorted, and then shrinks to a point behind, which will first turn red, then white, then blue. This is due to the effect of the hole's gravity on the wavelengths of passing light waves (this is called "blue shift").

But no one can tell exactly what will happen over the horizon. The problem is that the laws of physics we are used to do not work there. Therefore, scientists can only assume what happens to the matter in the black hole.

Most likely, according to Neil Tyson, a person is successfully spaghettized, just not before the event horizon, but behind it. Then what is left of the traveler will fall into a singularity - a region of space with infinite density in the center of the hole. Here.

So there will be no bookshelves and Morse code messages from the past sent to their daughter like in Interstellar.