Black holes remain one of the most mysterious entities in the universe, with scientists knowing little about them, and what is on the inside. Their ability to completely deconstruct the laws of physics remain both baffling and mesmerising. They completely break the laws of physics with their singularity at the centre, which is a one-dimensional point where gravity becomes infinite and space and time become curved.
The only other point in nature where a singularity existed is at the Big Bang.
What is inside a back hole is a mystery, but one expert believes that if you were to cross the event horizon – the point of no return where the clutches of the black hole’s gravity becomes to powerful that nothing, not even light, can escape – you would see your future.
This is because space and time are connected, called space-time, and gravity has the ability to stretch space-time.
Objects with a large mass will be able to stretch space-time to the point where our perception of it changes, known as time dilation.
The more mass an object has, the more it stretches and slows down time so something as large as Sagittarius A* – the gigantic black hole at the centre of the galaxy – would be able to stretch time to a point where it almost comes to a complete standstill.
Paul Sutter, an astrophysicist at The Ohio State University and host of Ask a Spaceman and Space Radio, wrote in a piece for Space that if you were to hypothetically make it inside the black hole, this immense gravity can stretch the singularity to huge proportions, and therein lies your future.
Mr Stutter said: “Inside the event horizon of a black hole, this common-sense understanding breaks down. Here, a single point — the singularity — lies in your future.
“You simply must travel toward the singularity. Turn left, turn up, turn around, it doesn’t matter — the singularity always remains in front of you. And you will hit that singularity in a finite amount of time.
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“Your view of the singularity becomes grotesque and distorted as well. It’s pitch black — you can’t see it, because it lies in your future, and just like your future you don’t know what it looks like until you get there.
“But instead of appearing as a tiny point, the huge gravitational differences stretch that point to engulf most of your vision.
“As you approach the singularity, it appears as if you’re landing on the surface of a vast, featureless, empty, black planet.
“When the singularity stretches completely from horizon to horizon, then you’ve made it.”
However, there are a few issues with this theory.
Firstly, there is no chance that one would survive falling into a black hole and this is because of spagghetification.
For example, if you were travelling feet first into a black hole, the gravity be so strong you would literally be ‘spaghettified’, and you would be stretched out to a point where you would just be a stream of atoms heading towards the centre.
Another impossible hurdle to overcome would be getting to a black hole.
The nearest black hole to our planet is located 6,523 light-years away – one light-year is 5.88 trillion miles.
The farthest humans have been from Earth is 248,655 miles (400,171 km) in 1970 as part of NASA’s Apollo 13 mission when the craft swung around the far side of the moon – it took almost three days to get there.
