Black holes are often described as objects so dense that their gravitational pull tugs on everything – even light. But have you ever wondered what might happen if you fell into one? If you have, then you’re not alone; researchers have been trying to answer this question for eons.
Astronomers have yet to study a black hole up close, but distant observations have revealed what happens when a star gets too close to one. The said star would seemingly be ‘stretched’ to near-infinite lengths as it enters what’s known as the event horizon. Consequently, we can only imagine that falling into a black hole would be fatal for us.
Science fiction films have a much different idea – one that paints black holes as a type of ‘portal’ to other dimensions. Real-life science has long laughed at this idea, but the discovery of mass inflation singularity in the 1990s re-thinks the internal structure of certain black holes. This type of black hole would still stretch you if you fell into one, but only to finite amounts.
Some suggest that these finite amounts would be small enough that you could survive entering this type of black hole, but what happens next is still a mystery since astronomers have no sure-fire way of testing these theories.
There are undoubtedly still many questions, but answers are sparse as the nearest black hole is still many light-years away from Earth. We can only hope that future advancements in technology might bring us one step closer to understanding black holes and how they work; but perhaps more importantly, what would happen if you entered one?