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.
When you start feeling pain depends on the size of the black hole. If you're falling into a supermassive black hole, you'll begin to notice the tidal forces within about 600,000 kilometers (372,822 miles) of the center -- after you've already crossed the event horizon [source: Bunn].
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.
The more massive a black hole, the colder it is. Stellar black holes are very cold: they have a temperature of nearly absolute zero – which is zero Kelvin, or −273.15 degrees Celsius.
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.
These explosions generate beams of high-energy radiation, called gamma-ray bursts (GRBs), which are considered by astronomers to be the most powerful thing in the universe. What's more, these GRBs could be killing our chances of ever discovering life on other planets.
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.
Hence, yes, the black hole will be hotter than the Sun if you are hovering sufficiently close to it. Furthermore, there is no limit on the black hole's mass: this will be true for a black hole of any size, as long as you are close enough.
Black holes themselves are entirely dark and featureless. The giant ones at the centers of galaxies are also surprisingly small, despite containing millions or billions of times the mass of our sun. To make observing them yet more difficult, those giants are shrouded in clouds of dust and gas.
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.
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. According to Einstein's theory, time and space, in a way, trade places inside the hole.
We are in absolutely no danger from black holes. They're a bit like tigers – it's a bad idea to stick your head in their mouth, but you're probably not going to meet one on your way to the shops. Unlike tigers, black holes don't hunt. They're not roaming around space eating stars and planets.
There's nothing on the other side.
Over time they shrink down to nothing and simply pop away in a flash of energy. It's not exactly fast. A good size black hole — say, a few times more massive than the sun — will take about 10^100 years to eventually evaporate through this process, known as Hawking Radiation.
Because of the tidal forces it would feel as if you are being stretched head to toe, while your sides would feel like they are being pushed inward. Eventually the tidal forces would become so strong that they would rip you apart. This effect of tidal stretching is sometimes boringly referred to as spaghettification.
Einstein's theory of general relativity mathematically predicts the existence of wormholes, but none have been discovered to date. A negative mass wormhole might be spotted by the way its gravity affects light that passes by.
Black holes have two parts. There is the event horizon, which you can think of as the surface, though it's simply the point where the gravity gets too strong for anything to escape. And then, at the center, is the singularity. That's the word we use to describe a point that is infinitely small and infinitely dense.
What's really happening inside a black hole? We don't know — and the scary part is that we may never know.
A supernova is the hottest thing in the universe. The temperatures at the core during an explosion skyrocket up to 6000X the temperature of the sun's core.
According to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the coldest point in the cosmos is the Boomerang Nebula. According to NASA, the Boomerang Nebula is the coldest spot in the known cosmos, with a temperature of one degree Kelvin. One degree Kelvin is 458 degrees Fahrenheit, or roughly 272 degrees Celsius.
Is it possible for a black hole to "eat" an entire galaxy? No. There is no way a black hole would eat an entire galaxy. The gravitational reach of supermassive black holes contained in the middle of galaxies is large, but not nearly large enough for eating the whole galaxy.
In astrophysics, spaghettification is the tidal effect caused by strong gravitational fields. When falling towards a black hole, for example, an object is stretched in the direction of the black hole (and compressed perpendicular to it as it falls).
The Milky Way galaxy contains some 100 billion stars. Roughly one out of every thousand stars that form is massive enough to become a black hole. Therefore, our galaxy must harbor some 100 million stellar-mass black holes. Most of these are invisible to us, and only about a dozen have been identified.
The ultramassive black hole in the galaxy cluster Abell 1201 packs a mass of 30 billion suns. Astronomers have just discovered what may be the largest black hole known to date. The giant black hole has a mass of 30 billion suns and sits at the center of a galaxy located hundreds of millions of light-years from Earth.