So planets could potentially form around black holes, but that's no guarantee that they offer a life-friendly environment. On Earth, living things are hugely dependent on the light and warmth from the Sun to survive. Without the glow of a star, life around a black hole would likely need an alternative source of energy.
Sorry, science fiction fans. You can't actually survive a trip through a black hole. And if you tried to take a plunge into one, like Matthew McConaughey in the movie Interstellar, you'd be ripped apart long before you could find out what's on the other side.
Black hole news: Standing on edge of black hole would cause 700 years to pass in 1 minute.
After just a few minutes more — 21 to 22 minutes total — the entire mass of the Earth would have collapsed into a black hole just 1.75 centimeters (0.69”) in diameter: the inevitable result of an Earth's mass worth of material collapsing into a black hole.
Near a black hole, the slowing of time is extreme. From the viewpoint of an observer outside the black hole, time stops. For example, an object falling into the hole would appear frozen in time at the edge of the hole. Inside a black hole is where the real mystery lies.
Since nothing can escape from the gravitational force of a black hole, it was long thought that black holes are impossible to destroy. But we now know that black holes actually evaporate, slowly returning their energy to the Universe.
The nearest known black hole is Gaia BH1, which was discovered in September 2022 by a team led by Kareem El-Badry. Gaia BH1 is 1,560 light-years away from Earth in the direction of the constellation Ophiuchus.
The event horizon of a black hole is the point of no return. Anything that passes this point will be swallowed by the black hole and forever vanish from our known universe. The distance from a black hole's center of mass to where gravity's pull is too strong to overcome is called the event horizon.
No human has ever been inside of a black hole. Humans are not yet capable of interstellar travel. Even if a human was able to travel to a black hole, he or she would not be able to survive entering it. Black holes condense all the matter that falls into it into one point called a quantum singularity.
Fortunately, this has never happened to anyone — black holes are too far away to pull in any matter from our solar system.
At present, we don't have spacecraft that could get us anywhere near a black hole. But, even leaving that small detail aside, attempting to travel into the past using a black hole might be the last thing you ever do.
For most space objects, we use light-years to describe their distance. A light-year is the distance light travels in one Earth year. One light-year is about 6 trillion miles (9 trillion km). That is a 6 with 12 zeros behind it!
While researchers have never found a wormhole in our universe, scientists often see wormholes described in the solutions to important physics equations. Most prominently, the solutions to the equations behind Einstein's theory of space-time and general relativity include wormholes.
Since the Milky Way contains over 100 billion stats, our home galaxy must harbor some 100 million black holes. Though detecting black holes is a difficult task and estimates from NASA suggest there could be as many as 10 million to a billion stellar black holes in the Milky Way.
It would take 10100 years, or a googol, for a supermassive black hole to fully disappear. “The entire age of the universe [is] a fraction of [the time] it would take,” says Priyamvada Natarajan, a researcher at Yale University who probes the nature of black holes. “As far as we're concerned, it is eternity.”
It is possible for two black holes to collide. Once they come so close that they cannot escape each other's gravity, they will merge to become one bigger black hole. Such an event would be extremely violent. Even when simulating this event on powerful computers, we cannot fully understand it.
Its mass, M, is its sensitivity to gravity. So Q > M means gravity is the weaker of the two. From their assumption that black holes ought to be able to decay, the four physicists made a more sweeping conjecture that gravity must be the weakest force in any viable universe.
Wormholes are possible, according to Einstein's general theory of relativity, but nobody has ever spotted one.
In reality, they are purely theoretical. Unlike black holes—also once thought to be purely theoretical—no evidence for an actual wormhole has ever been found, although they are fascinating from an abstract theoretical physics perceptive.
Unless the wormhole was thoroughly cleaned out and everything else blocked from entering it, falling in would mean certain death. “Whenever you travel close to the speed of light, any particle or dust grain or anything that you hit will be problematic. Even a photon would cause you trouble,” says Maldacena.
A light-year is the distance a beam of light travels in a single Earth year, which equates to approximately 6 trillion miles (9.7 trillion kilometers).
whence the travel time for 40 light years will be 40×30000016.8≈700000years.
The speed of light traveling through a vacuum is exactly 299,792,458 meters (983,571,056 feet) per second. That's about 186,282 miles per second — a universal constant known in equations as "c," or light speed.
So a black hole not only warps the space around it, but time too. “Time is going slower there by a factor of 1,000,” says Bakala. That means for every 1,000 days that pass on Earth – a little over three years – just a single day elapses on the black hole planet.
But, the problem is that we can't get up close to see for ourselves. Why, we can't even take photographs of anything that takes place inside a black hole — if light cannot escape their immense gravity, then nothing can be snapped by a camera.