30 | NewScientist | 20 April 2019gravitational field would change the
nature of the light you can see. If your
neck muscles had the strength to let you
take one last look over your shoulder, all
the starlight behind you would appear to
come together to form a single reddish
dot. Meanwhile, the quiet of outer space
would turn to total darkness and you
would feel that you are falling downhill,
says Natarajan – “except downhill is
everywhere”.
And then your body would undergo
spectacular tortures. The gravity inside
a black hole increases so quickly that it
wouldn’t just crush you, but pull apart
every part of your body at different
speeds, resulting in “spaghettification”.
If you fell in feet first, your ankles would
stretch away from your knees before your
neck elongated into a strand of linguine,
but the difference in time would be small
enough that you probably wouldn’t
notice. “It would happen in the blink
of an eye, which may not be the best
expression since your eyes are going
to pop out,” says Natarajan.HELP!
I’ve fallen into
a black hole
I
MAGINE you are floating along in space.
It is quiet and cold, serene but slightly
terrifying. Suddenly, you feel a tug, faint
at first, but getting ever stronger as it pulls
you towards an empty region of the sky.
Before you know it, you have entered a
black hole. “That’s when the universe
starts to go bizarre on you,” says
Priyamvada Natarajan at Yale University.
With the publication of the first
ever picture of a black hole this week
(see page 6), any residual doubt that these
monsters of space-time exist is banished.
But as to what happens inside one – well,What happens next to the
newly spaghettified, eyeless,
accelerating you?To stay where you are, go to A
To wait for a black hole burp, go to B
To seek a white hole exit, go to C
To try to radiate yourself away, go to DNobody knows what happens when you enter a black hole,
but there is no shortage of ideas. Chelsea Whyte lets you
choose your own unsettling adventure
there physicists are still mightily in
dispute. So what are your possible fates,
should you ever be so unlucky as to have
a close encounter of the black hole kind?
All objects exert a gravitational pull
on one another, but for the most part, this
force is pretty weak. In the case of black
holes, the pull is so strong that nothing –
not even light – can escape. A black hole is
so massive that time itself starts to warp.
You wouldn’t feel anything different as
you fell in, but to anyone watching, you
would appear to slow.
Circling down the drain of this cosmic
plughole, all the photons being pulled
alongside you would create a stream of
blinding light orbiting a hole of total
blackness – as we saw in the Event
Horizon Telescope team’s image. Two
freaky effects would colour your final
approach: a looming darkness would
wash over your eyes as the black hole
seems to grow in size much more
quickly than you would expect, and the
surrounding stars would start to distort
and bend.
This is your last opportunity to escape.
Any further, and you will cross the event
horizon, the line where the black hole’s
gravity is too large to resist.
“By the time you are able to see the
event horizon,” says Natarajan, “you can
see starlight bend around it.” Curved
streaks of light would wrap around the
black hole, but as you accelerated through
the point of no return, the intensity of the