If you leapt heroically into a stellar-mass black hole, your body would be subjected to a process called 'spaghettification' (no, really, it is). The black hole's gravity force would compress you from top to toe, while stretching you at the same time… thus, spaghetti.
Death by black hole
Of course, no matter what type of black hole you plunge into, you're ultimately going to get torn apart by its extreme gravity and die a horrible death. No material that falls inside a black hole could survive intact.
Fortunately, this has never happened to anyone — black holes are too far away to pull in any matter from our solar system. But scientists have observed black holes ripping stars apart, a process that releases a tremendous amount of energy.
on edge of Black Hole. Space and time are intertwined, called space-time, and gravity has the ability to stretch space-time. Objects with a large mass will be able to stretch space-time to the point where our perception of it changes, known as time dilation.
To a distant observer, clocks near a black hole would appear to tick more slowly than those farther away from the black hole. Due to this effect, known as gravitational time dilation, an object falling into a black hole appears to slow as it approaches the event horizon, taking an infinite time to reach it.
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.
Beyond the event horizon lies a truly minuscule point called a singularity, where gravity is so intense that it infinitely curves space-time itself. This is where the laws of physics, as we know them, break down, meaning all theories about what lies beyond are just speculation.
The fate of anyone falling into a black hole would be a painful “spaghettification,” an idea popularized by Stephen Hawking in his book “A Brief History of Time.” In spaghettification, the intense gravity of the black hole would pull you apart, separating your bones, muscles, sinews and even molecules.
Anything outside this surface —including astronauts, rockets, or light—can escape from the black hole. But once this surface is crossed, nothing can escape, regardless of its speed, because of the strong gravitational pull toward the center of the black hole.
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.
The possibility that a black hole could actually impact Earth may seem straight out of science fiction, but the reality is that microscopic primordial black holes could actually hit Earth. If one did, it wouldn't just impact like an asteroid, it'd pass straight through the entire Earth and exit the other side.
Solitary black holes can generally only be detected by measuring their gravitational distortion of the light from more distant objects. Gaia BH1 was discovered on 13 June 2022 by Tineke Roegiers. Gaia BH1 is 1,560 light-years away from Earth in the direction of the constellation Ophiuchus.
Don't let the name fool you: a black hole is anything but empty space. Rather, it is a great amount of matter packed into a very small area - think of a star ten times more massive than the Sun squeezed into a sphere approximately the diameter of New York City.
There's nothing on the other side.
But don't expect a black hole to disappear any time soon. It takes a shockingly long time for a black hole to shed all of its mass as energy via Hawking radiation. It would take 10100 years, or a googol, for a supermassive black hole to fully disappear.
For all practical purposes the matter has disappeared from the universe. Once inside the black hole's event horizon, matter will be torn apart into its smallest subatomic components and eventually be squeezed into the singularity.
A new model suggests how gravitational waves created by the collision between black holes spread and interact within the fabric of space-time. When black holes collide and merge to form even more massive black holes, this violent process sends ripples surging through the very fabric of space.
Inside what's known as the black hole's event horizon, not even light itself can escape from a black hole. But that doesn't mean that black holes will live forever; on the contrary, they slowly decay away due to a phenomenon known as Hawking radiation.
Not quite. No one has ever created a black hole on our planet before. But even if someone did, it likely wouldn't pose a huge threat. Real-world black holes are only scary in the sense that if you get too close to one, you won't be able to escape.
A black hole is an extremely massive concentration of matter, created when the largest stars collapse at the end of their lives. Astronomers theorize that a point with infinite density—called a singularity—lies at the center of black holes.
Bottom line: simply falling into a black hole won't give you a view of the entire future of the universe. Black holes can exist without being part of the final big crunch, and matter can fall into black holes.
White holes cannot exist, since they violate the second law of thermodynamics.
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!
Astronomers have discovered two new black holes that are the closest ones to Earth known, and also represent something that astronomers have never seen before. The black holes, designated Gaia BH1 and Gaia BH2, were discovered in data collected by the European Space Agency's (ESA) Gaia spacecraft.