have we ever sent something into a black hole

Each bit of your body would also be elongated in a slightly different direction. If you jumped into the black hole feet first, the gravitational force on your toes would be much stronger than that pulling on your head. This is because the black hole's gravity compresses your body horizontally while pulling it like taffy in the vertical direction. If you were free-floating in space near a stellar-mass black hole that wasn’t feeding on anything, your only hint that it exists might be the gravitational magnification, or “lensing,” effect it could have on background stars.īut as you flew closer to this strange spot, you’d be stretched in some directions and squished in others, a process that scientists call spaghettification. In other words, you only have to fall a very short distance to experience an extremely noticeable difference in gravity. Smaller black holes actually have a more dramatic gravitational gradient than supermassive ones. This difference occurs thanks to a property of black holes that would likely surprise some casual observers. Stellar-mass black holes may be puny in comparison to their bigger cousins, but they actually boast more extreme tidal forces just beyond their event horizons. Intermediate-mass black holes are still mysterious, and only a few suspected examples have been discovered, but astronomers think they may form through a similar process of accretion, just on a smaller scale. Supermassive black holes live in the centers of most galaxies, and likely grow to their extreme sizes - up to tens of billions of times more massive than our sun - by consuming stars and merging with other black holes. Stellar-mass black holes form when very large stars finish burning their fuel and collapse into themselves. So if you jumped into one, your exact fate might depend on which sort of black hole you choose.Īt the simplest level, there are three kinds of black holes: stellar-mass black holes, supermassive black holes and intermediate-mass black holes. Choose Your Own Black Hole Adventureīlack holes come in different varieties and can be modeled with different levels of complexity, like whether or not they spin or have an electrical charge. Today, black holes are considered an ordinary part of stellar evolution, and astronomers suspect our Milky Way galaxy holds millions of them alone. However, the concept wasn’t really taken seriously until the 1960s, when extremely compact stars were discovered. Physicists had toyed with theories about similar objects for decades before Albert Einstein’s general relativity predicted their existence. This is where the laws of physics, as we know them, break down, meaning all theories about what lies beyond are just speculation.īlack holes seem exotic to most of us, but they’re commonplace to scientists. Beyond the event horizon lies a truly minuscule point called a singularity, where gravity is so intense that it infinitely curves space-time itself. They’re only visible when they’re feeding on stars or gas clouds that stray too close to their boundary, called the event horizon. Black holes are aptly named because they usually don't reflect or emit light.

Have we ever sent something into a black hole