Scientists believe that humans will investigate black holes firsthand, according to a new discovery ripped from Interstellar. What’s the catch? If you jump into a black hole, don’t hope to return to our world any time soon.
In a recent article in The Conversation, Grinnell College physicists clarify that “A human can do this only if the respective black hole is supermassive and isolated, and if the person entering the black hole does not expect to report the findings to anyone in the entire Universe”.
That’s because supermassive black holes have peculiar mechanics that result in a mix of gravity and event horizon that doesn’t immediately drag a person into a dead slice of pasta.
Since supermassive black holes are significantly larger than stellar and intermediate black holes, their constituent components are more distributed widely. A human dropping through a black hole will arrive at the event horizon—the black hole’s edge from which not even light would escape and where gravity is so intense that light would circle the black hole as planets surround stars—much faster than if the black hole were smaller.
The vast disparity in the gravitational pull between your head and toes allows you to curl into a spaghetti-like noodle when you reach the black hole’s event horizon.
