Journey to a black hole! (part 1)
Suppose you are falling into a black hole!! What will happen to you? It’s an age-old question. Lets see…
A black hole is a place where laws of physics as we know
them break down. Einstein taught us that gravity warps space itself, causing it
to curve. The instant you entered the
black hole, reality would split in two. In one you would be instantly
incinerated and in the other you would plunge on into the hole utterly unharmed!!!
As you go deeper into the black hole, space becomes more
curve, at the center, it becomes infinitely curved. This is called singularity.
Laws of physics, all of which require space and time, can’t be applied here.
Lets imagine, you are falling into a black hole and your
best friend, we’ll call him Sam- who is watching in horror as you plunge
towards the black hole. As you accelerate towards the event horizon, Sam sees
you stretch and contort, as if he were seeing you through a giant magnifying
glass.
You can’t shout to her, as there is no air in space, but you might try
flashing her a Morse message with the light on your iPhone (there’s an app for
that)! Your words reach him more slowly, increasingly lower and redder
frequencies: “Okay, o k a y, o k a
y…. “
When you reach horizon, Sam sees you freeze. You remain
plastered there, motionless, stretched across the surface of the horizon.
According to Sam, you are slowly obliterated by the stretching of space, the
stopping of time, fires of Hawing radiation. Before you ever cross over into
the black hole’s darkness, you are reduced to ash!!
In fact, in a big enough black hole, you could live out the
rest of your life pretty normally before dying at the singularity. That’s
because, you are in freefall, therefore you feel no gravity! How interesting!!!
But where is Sam? If you are chilling inside the black hole,
why is she insisting that you’ve been burned outside the horizon? Is she hallucinating???
We will see it in the next article!
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