Allison Filice
IMAGINE you are floating along in space. 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. “That’s when the universe starts to go bizarre on you,” says Priyamvada Natarajan at Yale University.
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. So what are your possible fates, should you ever be so unlucky as to have a close encounter of the black hole kind?
All objects exert a gravitational pull on one another, but for the most part, this force is pretty weak. In the case of black holes, the pull is so strong that nothing – not even light – can escape. A black hole is so massive that time itself starts to warp. You wouldn’t feel anything different as you fell in, but to anyone watching, you would appear to slow.
Circling down the drain of this cosmic plughole, all the photons being pulled alongside you would create a stream of blinding light orbiting a hole of total blackness – as we saw in the Event Horizon Telescope team’s image. Two freaky effects would colour your final approach: a looming darkness would wash over your eyes as the black hole seems to grow in size much more quickly than you would expect, and the…
