The same force ripping you apart would also concentrate the view of the universe into a thin band around your waist. So if you would like to be taller and thinner, then one way to achieve that is to fall into a black hole." "At the same time as you are pulled apart vertically, you are crushed in the horizontal direction, like a rubber band being pulled. You feel this difference in gravity between your feet and your head as a tidal force, which pulls you apart vertically in a process called 'spaghettification,' " Hamilton writes on his Web site. "The gravity at your feet is stronger than the gravity at your head, as long as you fall in feet first. Once you pass the horizon - or go over Niagara Falls, in the waterfall analogy - you would be falling faster than the speed of light toward the black hole's center - called a singularity - and feeling the effects, Hamilton said. The view of the outside universe would become distorted, but would not disappear. Many people think you would be engulfed in darkness when you fall in, but that is a common misconception, Hamilton points out. Blog: What is a white hole?Īpproaching the horizon, you would notice nothing special, but someone observing you from the outside would see you freeze in place and become a lot dimmer because light that you emit at the boundary takes a long time to get out, Hamilton said. But most galaxies also have supermassive black holes at their centers, which weigh millions of suns and would have boundaries that stretch millions of miles. The most common black holes, which weigh on average 10 times as much as the sun, have boundaries 40 miles across. The more massive a black hole, the bigger this point of no return around it, said Jeff McClintock, a senior astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. To be sucked in by a black hole, you need to reach its event horizon, the one-way boundary beyond which nothing can escape. "Even light itself, which is struggling to get out, pointed away from the black hole, will find itself dragged inward, like doing a Michael Jackson moonwalk." "I think of a black hole as rather like a waterfall, except it's not a fall of water but rather a fall of space," he said. Hamilton also described them as places where space is falling faster than light. Jupiter's stormy Great Red Spot is shrinkingīlack holes form when massive stars run out of nuclear fuel, collapse and become so compressed and dense that not even light can escape their gravitational pull.Simulation background: Milky Way panorama.Watch what you might see inside a black hole » The results are described in a recent paper and shown in a simulation that took more than 100,000 lines of computer code to create. Hamilton and Gavin Polhemus, a physics teacher in Fort Collins, Colorado, set out to visualize what an "infaller" might see if he or she were swallowed by the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way. "But as a practical matter, they are, in fact, much simpler than the sun, far simpler than stars and infinitely simpler than human beings." We think of them as being complicated things because they're described by complicated mathematics," Hamilton said. "Black holes are some of the simplest things in the universe. Scientists can try to simulate a trip inside with the help of equations in Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity, which make predictions about black hole behavior, said Andrew Hamilton, a professor of astrophysics at the University of Colorado at Boulder. In fact, astronomers can't even see black holes directly, though there is strong evidence millions of them exist in our galaxy alone. Humans have only gotten close to black holes in sci-fi books and movies.
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