This boundary, the innermost stable circular orbit (or ISCO for the lovers of astronomical jargon), is a firm prediction of Einstein's general theory of relativity, the same theory that predicts the existence of black holes in the first place. But if you're a hapless chunk of gas, you're doomed to fall freely toward the waiting dark nightmare below. You have only two choices: if you have rockets or some other source of energy, you can propel yourself away to safety. Once you reach this region, you cannot remain in placid orbit. Just outside the black hole, but before reaching the event horizon, the gravitational forces are so extreme that stable orbits become impossible. But still, if it weren't for those frictional forces, the material would be able to orbit around the black hole in perpetuity, the same way that the planets can orbit around the sun for billions of years.Īs you get closer to the black hole's center, though, you reach a certain point where all hopes of stability are dashed against the rocks of gravity. In the accretion disk, individual bits of material rub up against other bits, draining them of rotational energy and driving them ever-inward to the gaping maw of the black hole's event horizon. In the case of the most massive black holes, the accretion disks around them glow so intensely that they get a new name: active galactic nuclei (AGN), capable of outshining millions of individual galaxies. That disk spins and spins, with heat, friction, and magnetic and electric forces energizing it, causing the material to glow brightly. As material falls toward the black hole, it tends to get squeezed into a razor-thin band known as an accretion disk. Once these foolhardy adventurers get caught in the black hole's gravitational embrace, they begin the journey toward the end. Indeed, lots of stuff in the universe finds itself orbiting around black holes. Gravity is just gravity, and orbits are orbits. A particular black hole will have a certain mass (anywhere from a few times the mass of the sun for the smaller ones in the galaxy up to billions of times heavier for the true monsters roaming the cosmos), and orbiting the black hole is just like orbiting anything else of identical mass. In reality, the gravitational pull of a black hole is the same of that for a regular star-just a lot stronger.Outside a black hole, however, everything is just dandy. Black holes get a bad reputation for sucking in their surroundings, like some sort of cosmic vacuum cleaner. So, if we can’t agree, what do we think happens to you? Black holes don’t suckįirst, let’s clear up a common misconception. You, as the faller, would experience a reality very different from what I, as an observer from the outside, would see. The answer is surprising because you get a different one depending on whom you ask. But what would happen to you if you were to find yourself falling into a black hole? Thanks to Einstein’s theory of general relativity, a framework that helps us understand how space and time behave in the presence of strong gravity, we can predict the specifics of what would happen to us without having to go through it ourselves. If massless photons cannot escape the clutches of a black hole, then certainly neither could we. The stellar core can then implode in the production of a supernova or, as is the case for more massive stars, collapse to then form a black hole. Once a star runs out of fuel to burn, and thus can no longer support itself via radiation pressure, the layers of metals fused up to that point will all come crashing down towards the center. As we discussed in a previous episode, black holes can form as a result of stellar death. Black holes are regions of space where the gravity is so thick that not even light can force its way out.
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