No, no human or man-made object has ever been inside a black hole, primarily because they are incredibly far away and our technology can't reach them; anyone falling in would face extreme forces, like spaghettification and immense gravity, leading to destruction before reaching the singularity, and time dilation makes observation from afar impossible.
The good news is there's no way you'll ever get sucked into a black hole. You would have to get really close to one. The nearest black hole is about 1,500 light years away. So, you would have to travel at the speed of light—which we can't do—for 1,500 years to get there.
TON 618 is scary due to its incomprehensible size (66 billion solar masses), making it an ultramassive black hole, its immense event horizon that dwarfs the entire Solar System, its extreme brightness as a quasar outshining galaxies, and the profound mystery of how such a massive object formed so early in the universe, challenging known physics. It represents an ultimate cosmic monster that seems to defy the rules of black hole growth, making it a source of awe and existential dread.
1 hour on Earth can equal 7 years in space (or vice versa) due to time dilation, a concept from Einstein's relativity where strong gravity or extreme speeds slow down time relative to an outside observer, famously depicted in the movie Interstellar on a planet near a black hole where an hour for the crew meant years passing on Earth. It's not about speed alone in orbit (ISS astronauts age slightly slower), but about proximity to immense mass, like a black hole, bending spacetime so drastically that time crawls for those nearby compared to time far away.
One minute near a black hole can equal years, decades, or even millennia on Earth due to extreme gravitational time dilation, where time slows drastically as gravity intensifies; the exact duration depends on the black hole's mass and your proximity to its event horizon, with the effect becoming almost infinite at the horizon itself, making an observer seem frozen to someone far away, though time still passes normally for the person falling in.
Your body stretches out, not uncomfortably at first, but over time, the stretching will become more severe. Astronomers call this spaghettification because the intense gravitational field pulls you into a long, thin piece of spaghetti. When you start feeling pain depends on the size of the black hole.
The magnitude of this scale factor (nearly 300,000 kilometres or 190,000 miles in space being equivalent to one second in time), along with the fact that spacetime is a manifold, implies that at ordinary, non-relativistic speeds and at ordinary, human-scale distances, there is little that humans might observe that is ...
Once every 176 years, the giant planets on the outer reaches of the solar system all gather on one side of the sun, and such a configuration was due to occur in the late 1970s.
For quick calculations, the approximate conversion factors are; one Martian day = one earth day, one Martian hour = three Earth hours, one Martian minute = three Earth minutes, one Martian second = three Earth seconds.
Return to the Moon
Artemis II, scheduled for launch between February and April sees the return of the first people to the Moon since Apollo 17 in 1972. Three American and one Canadian astronaut will orbit the Moon on a 10 day journey that lays the foundation for lunar landings in the coming years.
Devoured by Gravity - Poster
Lurking in our galaxy, approximately 6,000 light-years from Earth, is a monster black hole named CygnusX-1. Don't get too close, or you'll become its next meal!
Together, dark energy and dark matter make up 95% of the universe. That's almost the whole universe! That only leaves a small 5% for all the matter and energy we know and understand.
We are extremely confident black holes exist due to overwhelming evidence like stars orbiting invisible, super-massive objects (Sagittarius A*), gravitational waves from merging black holes detected by LIGO, and direct imaging of their shadows by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT). While "100% sure" is rare in science, the consistency between Einstein's relativity, observed phenomena, and these new direct proofs leaves virtually no doubt within the scientific community.
About 95% of the universe is "invisible" because it's composed of dark matter (around 27%) and dark energy (around 68%), which don't emit, absorb, or reflect light, unlike the normal matter (stars, planets, us) that makes up the visible 5%. Dark matter's presence is inferred through its gravitational pull on visible galaxies, while dark energy is a mysterious force causing the universe's accelerated expansion.
Feasibility of production
In familiar three-dimensional gravity, the minimum energy of a microscopic black hole is 1016 TeV (equivalent to 1.6 GJ or 444 kWh), which would have to be condensed into a region on the order of the Planck length. This is far beyond the limits of any current technology.
No, no one has ever died in a black hole. At least not anyone human. The closest black hole we know of is still pretty far away and you couldn't get there if you wanted to.
No, water on Mars is not drinkable in its current form; it's frozen as ice or exists as extremely salty brines contaminated with toxic perchlorates, requiring significant purification (filtration, distillation, or specialized bioreactors) to remove salts and oxidizers before it could be used for human consumption or even rocket fuel. While Mars once had liquid water, today's Martian water sources need substantial treatment to become safe for drinking.
Big news from the Loomiverse… We're going to Mars 🚀🫐 💫 We're thrilled to welcome Alyssa Carson @nasablueberry — the youngest person ever certified for suborbital spaceflight and a future woman on Mars — as our newest Loominary.
Yes, when you look at the Sun, you see it as it was about 8 minutes ago because light travels at a finite speed, taking roughly 8.3 minutes to cover the distance from the Sun to Earth, acting like a cosmic time machine, showing us the past of all celestial objects. This means if the Sun vanished, we wouldn't know for 8 minutes, and it also applies to everything else in space, with farther objects showing us even older history.
Without a space suit, you’d lose consciousness in about 15 seconds, die after 90 seconds and freeze solid within 12 to 26 hours.
NASA astronauts' salaries are based on the U.S. government's General Schedule (GS) pay scale, typically starting around the GS-12 to GS-13 level, with 2024 rates putting salaries between roughly $100,000 to over $150,000 annually, depending on experience and grade, with no extra pay for danger or overtime, only small daily incidentals while in space.
Yes, there has been an alleged crime in space, sparking the first NASA criminal investigation in orbit involving astronaut Anne McClain accessing her estranged spouse's bank account from the International Space Station (ISS) in 2019, though she was later cleared and her ex-spouse charged with making false statements, highlighting the legal complexities of jurisdiction in space. While no major crimes have been prosecuted in space, this incident proved the "long arm of the law" can reach orbit, with astronauts remaining under their home nation's laws for offenses committed on the ISS, according to intergovernmental agreements.
But eventually, the lack of oxygen will take its toll. One by one, your major organs will shut down. After only a handful of minutes you will suffer complete organ failure, otherwise known in the medical community as death.
It would take almost 12 days for a million seconds to elapse and 31.7 years for a billion seconds. Therefore, a trillion seconds would amount to no less than 31,709.8 years.
Clocks may have to skip a second — called a "negative leap second" — around 2029, a study in the journal Nature said Wednesday. "This is an unprecedented situation and a big deal," said study lead author Duncan Agnew, a geophysicist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego.