You would sometimes see stuff surrounding them, falling into the black hole. The second thing you might notice as you approach a black hole is that black holes are often not alone. Really, the only limitation is how much stuff is around to make the black hole and how much time you allow for the black hole to form. The smallest black hole we’ve detected in space is about 20 kilometers wide, and the largest is tens of billions of kilometers wide.
In fact, there is theoretically no limit to how big a black hole can be. The more mass, the bigger the black hole. For example, if you compress the sun, the distortion of space is higher and the event horizon happens farther out, at three kilometers, giving you a black hole six kilometers wide. But if you add more mass, that distance is larger. If you compress Earth enough, you’ll get a black hole the size of a marble because, at a distance of about a centimeter, light can no longer escape. The size of a black hole can change, depending on how much mass you squeeze inside. It’s the radius of the black sphere we call a black hole. The point at which light can no longer escape is called the “event horizon,” and it (more or less) defines where the black hole starts. That’s what a black hole is: it’s super-compacted mass, which makes it extremely powerful to the things immediately around it.Ī really compacted mass creates extreme gravity around itself, and at some distance, space gets so distorted (remember that gravity doesn’t just pull on things it distorts space) that not even light can escape.
You’d feel the entire mass of Earth, all of it really close to you. But as you get close to the small black hole, you’d feel an enormous amount of gravity. That’s because Earth is now all around you, so you’re being pulled equally in all directions.
As you get close to the center of Earth, you will actually start to feel no gravity. If you were to stand a distance of one Earth radius away from the center of Earth and one Earth radius from a marble-size black hole, you’d feel the same amount of gravity.īut as you get closer to each object, two very different things would happen. The Earth has about as much mass as a black hole that’s half an inch wide (about the size of a marble). Typically, things with a lot of mass are fairly spread out. They are weird regions of space out of which nothing can escape-voids in the fabric of space-time itself that are completely disconnected from the rest of reality.īut what would it be like to fall into one? Would you necessarily die? Would it feel different from falling into a regular hole? Would you discover deep secrets of the universe inside, or see time and space unfold before your very eyes? Would your eyes (or your brain) even work inside of a black hole? And we get it: black holes are mysterious. More likely, the fascination with falling into a black hole has less to do with the chances of it actually happening, and more to do with our basic curiosity about these intriguing space objects. But why is that? Are there black holes popping up everywhere in backyards across America? Are there people out there who are planning to have a picnic near one and are worried about letting their kids run around it unsupervised? It’s a common conundrum that gets covered in many science books, and it’s a question that our listeners and readers often ask us. A lot of people seem to have this question.
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