By Chelsea Whyte. It is quiet and cold, serene but slightly terrifying. Suddenly, you feel a tug, faint at first, but getting ever stronger as it pulls you towards an empty region of the sky. Before you know it, you have entered a black hole. With the publication of the first ever picture of a black hole this week , any residual doubt that these monsters of space-time exist is banished. But as to what happens inside one — well, there physicists are still mightily in dispute.
What would happen if you got sucked into a black hole?
The Biggest Myth About Black Holes
Black holes are regions of space where the gravity is so thick that not even light can force its way out. Once a star runs out of fuel to burn, and thus can no longer support itself via radiation pressure, the layers of metals fused up to that point will all come crashing down towards the center. The stellar core can then implode in the production of a supernova or, as is the case for more massive stars, collapse to then form a black hole. If massless photons cannot escape the clutches of a black hole, then certainly neither could we. The answer is surprising because you get a different one depending on whom you ask. You, as the faller, would experience a reality very different from what I, as an observer from the outside, would see.
NASA capture rare footage of black hole devouring a star
Or ever. Maybe even trying to imagine being in such a situation feels like writing yourself into a Doctor Who episode. But, for mathematicians, physicists, and other scientists attempting to understand cosmic strangeness in practical terms, these thought experiments are actually very useful. Which is why Hintz and his team were so curious about it. However, during that period space-time will also be stretching the bounds of what makes sense; what the philosophers called determinism.
If you fell into a black hole, you might expect to die instantly. But in fact your fate would be far stranger than that. This was the most-read story on BBC Earth in