![]() “Well, after I used that phrase four or five times, somebody in the audience said, ‘Why don’t you call it a black hole.’ So I adopted that,” Wheeler told science writer Marcia Bartusiak. According to Wheeler, who coined and popularized several other famous astronomy terms such as "wormholes," the suggestion came from an audience member at an astronomy conference where he was speaking, after he had repeatedly used the phrase "gravitationally collapsed objects to describe the cosmic giants. Yet much remains unknown about these cosmic enigmas, including what exactly happens to the stuff that they suck up with their titanic gravity.įifty years ago, physicist John Wheeler helped popularize the term "black hole" as a description for the collapsed remnants of supermassive stars. Astronomers have since found evidence of black holes in our universe, including a supermassive one at the center of our own Milky Way. They’re unobservable, uncontrollable and-for more than 50 years after their first prediction in 1916-undiscovered. The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.By their very name, black holes exude mystery. Rotating black holes may serve as gentle portals for hyperspace travel The scariest things in the universe are black holes – and here are 3 reasons Supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy may have a friend It was written by: Leo Rodriguez, Grinnell College and Shanshan Rodriguez, Grinnell College. If you found it interesting, you could subscribe to our weekly newsletter. This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit news site dedicated to sharing ideas from academic experts. We won’t be able to answer every question, but we will do our best. Hello, curious kids! Do you have a question you’d like an expert to answer? Ask an adult to send your question to Please tell us your name, age and the city where you live.Īnd since curiosity has no age limit – adults, let us know what you’re wondering, too. But they would enjoy the adventure, for as long as they survived … maybe …. Their journey and findings would be lost to the rest of the entire universe for all time. Keeping in mind that nothing can escape the gravitational pull beyond the event horizon, the in-falling person would not be able to send any information about their findings back out beyond this horizon. Now, if a person found an isolated supermassive black hole suitable for scientific study and decided to venture in, everything observed or measured of the black hole interior would be confined within the black hole’s event horizon. To enter one safely, you would need to find a supermassive black hole that is completely isolated and not feeding on surrounding material, gas and or even stars. They are most certainly not hospitable and would make traveling into the black hole extremely dangerous. These disks are called accretion disks and are very hot and turbulent. Most black holes that we observe in the universe are surrounded by very hot disks of material, mostly comprising gas and dust or other objects like stars and planets that got too close to the horizon and fell into the black hole. Leo and Shanshan Rodriguez, CC BY-ND Other considerations The person would experience spaghettification, and most likely not survive being stretched into a long, thin noodlelike shape.Ī person falling into a supermassive black hole would likely survive. In other words, if the person is falling feet first, as they approach the event horizon of a stellar mass black hole, the gravitational pull on their feet will be exponentially larger compared to the black hole’s tug on their head. ![]() This implies, due to the closeness of the black hole’s center, that the black hole’s pull on a person will differ by a factor of 1,000 billion times between head and toe, depending on which is leading the free fall. Thus, someone falling into a stellar-size black hole will get much, much closer to the black hole’s center before passing the event horizon, as opposed to falling into a supermassive black hole. ![]() The supermassive black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy, by contrast, has a mass of roughly 4 million solar masses, and it has an event horizon with a radius of 7.3 million miles or 17 solar radii. For a black hole with a mass of our Sun (one solar mass), the event horizon will have a radius of just under 2 miles. The radial size of the event horizon depends on the mass of the respective black hole and is key for a person to survive falling into one.
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