But as you get close to the small black hole, you’d feel an enormous amount of gravity. That’s because Earth is now all around you, so you’re being pulled equally in all directions. As you get close to the center of Earth, you will actually start to feel no gravity. If you were to stand a distance of one Earth radius away from the center of Earth and one Earth radius from a marble-size black hole, you’d feel the same amount of gravity.īut as you get closer to each object, two very different things would happen. The Earth has about as much mass as a black hole that’s half an inch wide (about the size of a marble). Typically, things with a lot of mass are fairly spread out. Why? Because gravity gets stronger the closer you are to something with mass, and having mass compacted means you can get really close to it. What keeps things inside is the gravity of the things already in them: mass is compacted so densely in a black hole that the effects of gravity are enormous. You can think of them as spheres of space where anything that goes into them stays there forever. So when you look at one, your eyes don’t see any photons, and your brain interprets that as black. They are definitely black: black holes give off absolutely no light, and any light that hits them gets trapped inside. The first thing you might notice as you approach a black hole is that black holes do indeed look like… black holes. So grab your picnic blanket, say good-bye to your kids (maybe forever), and hang on, because we are about to take a dive into the ultimate backyard hazard. There’s only one way to find out, and that is to jump in.
They are weird regions of space out of which nothing can escape-voids in the fabric of space-time itself that are completely disconnected from the rest of reality.īut what would it be like to fall into one? Would you necessarily die? Would it feel different from falling into a regular hole? Would you discover deep secrets of the universe inside, or see time and space unfold before your very eyes? Would your eyes (or your brain) even work inside of a black hole? And we get it: black holes are mysterious. More likely, the fascination with falling into a black hole has less to do with the chances of it actually happening, and more to do with our basic curiosity about these intriguing space objects. But why is that? Are there black holes popping up everywhere in backyards across America? Are there people out there who are planning to have a picnic near one and are worried about letting their kids run around it unsupervised? It’s a common conundrum that gets covered in many science books, and it’s a question that our listeners and readers often ask us. A lot of people seem to have this question.
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