Black Holes

Now onto the most complicated thing we know of next to the existence of life, Black holes. Black holes are the most powerful and violent things in the universe that we know of, they are gravity is so strong that not even light can escape it. Now before we get to the crazy stuff, we need to talk about to space and time, Space and Time are the stage that the play that is the universe unfolds upon, except space and time aren’t stationary things time doesn’t tick the same everywhere and space isn’t flat, in short space and time is relative, matter bends space and space bending tells matter how to move which creates the phenomenon of gravity, black holes don’t just bend the stage they are like trapdoors which warp the metaphorical stage to the point that the universe made a no go zone where the rules of gravity and time change. Black holes are made by something beautiful dying, a supermassive star imploding at a quarter of the speed of light which packs so much mass into such a dense and tight space that it doesn’t just bend the space around it, it kind of breaks it, a black hole is surrounded by a one way border called the event horizon, the event horizon is like a kind of shell that stops anything that’s inside of it to be see, not even light can escape, because no information can escape the event horizon we cant tell what the event horizon or the singularity at the center look like. So far, we have talked about a type of black hole called the Schwarzschild black hole, but that is a straightforward way of thinking about black holes, now I’m going to tell you why the most complicated thing in the universe is even more complicated, black holes spin.

 

What does black holes spin change? It adds a new region in around the black hole called the Ergo sphere, where space and time are only half broken compared to the event horizon where nothing escapes and spacetime is broken to a point we don’t fully understand yet, in the ergo sphere the black hole forces its energy on what ever enters it pushing it to nearly the speed of light, to stay put in this region of spacetime you need to move faster than the speed of light. It also changes what the singularity is because a single point with zero depth and zero height cannot spin, so instead it is a ringularity.

 

Now on to the most important part of black holes, what happens when you fall into one? Black holes absorb everything as we talked about before, which means you should get absorbed too, well not exactly. when you fall into a black hole, it appears as though you are falling into a really long hole, with a small circle of the outside world above you, eventually you “fall” to a point that it feels like your being squeezed and elongated into spaghetti, this “spaghettification” only happens in Stellar black holes, there are much, MUCH larger ones. There are three black hole types that are important to us, Stellar black holes with around twenty solar masses, Intermediate with around a hundred solar masses, and Supermassive with up to 1’000’000 solar masses and sometimes more than that, I will explain why later. In an intermediate black hole, you would get something like a stellar black hole, except you don’t get spaghettified, instead when you enter the event horizon you don’t feel much of anything for hours, days or even weeks if the intermediate black hole is large enough, but after a certain point you start feeling a tugging at your feet and then less so at your head, the gravitational pulling starts pulling harder and harder on your feet but not as much at your head, until you get ripped in half again and again until you reach the singularity and get condensed into the ringularity. With a Supermassive black hole, it gets weird, these things are so big they possibly shape galaxies around them, falling into a supermassive might take infinite time because of how big the event horizon is you might orbit the black hole without ever reaching the ringularity, let’s say you get to the ringularity, you would be squished into the ringularity very quickly. Now the weird part of being near a black hole, matter isn’t the only thing that orbits black holes, light does as well mean if you look to the side you’ll see the back of your own head, while everyone outside only sees a slowly dissipating image of the light you emitted and the light that reflected from you. Also, all of this is about theoretical black holes because we do not know if they work like this.