8/6/2023 0 Comments A journey into a black holeAndrew Hamilton / JILA / University of Colorado At the event horizon, even if you ran (or swam) at the speed of light, there would be no overcoming the flow of spacetime, which drags you into the singularity at the center. depending on how you want to visualize it. Space is fundamentally in motion - like a moving walkway - continuously, moving everything in it towards the singularity.īoth inside and outside the event horizon, space flows like either a moving walkway or a waterfall. But inside an event horizon, you're always in motion. Normally, we think of space as a stationary fabric and we think of an observer as being "plunked" down somewhere. The way to try and make sense of it is to change the way you visualize space. There are a number of lessons we can learn from examining these results, and many of them are counterintuitive. Hamilton has also created a series of spectacular visualizations on what you would see as you fell into a black hole, based on these calculations. The physics of this is complicated, but the calculations are straightforward, and were most elegantly performed by Andrew Hamilton of the University of Colorado in a series of papers spanning the late 2000s to the early 2010s. In the last moments, space would bizarrely look completely flat. The light you received would blueshift, but then redshift again, as you inevitably fell towards the singularity. Around the event horizon, space is so distorted that you begin to see multiple images of the outside Universe, as though they were reflected and inverted.Īnd once you crossed inside the event horizon, you'd not only still see the outside Universe, but a portion of the Universe inside the event horizon. The event horizon appears to get much larger far faster than you'd expect, as the curvature of space gets severe. The experience you'd have would be extremely different. Instead, imagine that you yourself are the infalling object. Now, imagine the same scenario, but this time, don't imagine you're observing the infalling object from afar. Objects that have previously fallen in will still be visible, although their light will appear faint and red (easily shifted so far into the red they are invisible to human eyes) in proportion to the amount of time that's passed since they crossed the event horizon. This artist’s impression depicts a Sun-like star being torn apart by tidal disruption as it nears a. The event horizon is like an asymptote for the object's light you'll always be able to see it if you look hard enough. Instead, it would just approach that state: getting fainter, redder, and harder to detect. It wouldn't completely disappear though not quickly, and not ever. It would appear to slow down, fade away, and get redder in color. It would speed up towards the event horizon, remaining the same color, and then something strange would happen. If you were to start off a large distance away from this black hole, at rest, and allowed an object to fall into it, what would you see?Īssuming you were able to remain stationary, you'd see this infalling object slowly accelerate away from you, towards this black hole. Space is curved by the presence of this mass, which causes every object within the Universe to experience an acceleration towards the central singularity. Outside of the event horizon, gravity behaves just like you'd conventionally expect. to a singularity that is, at most, one-dimensional. Once you cross the threshold to form a black hole, everything inside the event horizon crunches down. This is an simplified version of a realistic black hole, but a good place to start thinking about the physics that occurs in two distinct places: outside the event horizon and inside the event horizon. The event horizon is located a specific distance (the Schwarzschild radius) away from the singularity in all directions equally. That region is perfectly spherical, and has a boundary separating the regions where light can escape from the region where it cannot: the event horizon. It has an event horizon that surrounds a single point, and a region surrounding that point from which light cannot escape. When we typically think of a black hole, we imagine the much simpler kind: one described by its mass only. When the black hole rotates, the space both outside and inside the event horizon rotates, too: this is the effect of frame-dragging, which can be enormous for black holes. can form, with an event horizon proportional to its mass and an accretion disk of infalling matter surrounding it. When a massive enough star ends its life, or two massive enough stellar remnants merge, a black hole.
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