Welcome to the place of no return — a region in space where the gravitational pull is so strong that not even light can escape it. This is a black hole.
Welcome, earthlings, to the place of no return: a region in space where the gravitational pull is so strong, not even light can escape it. This is a black hole.
It’s O. K. to feel lost here. Even Albert Einstein, whose theory of general relativity made it possible to conceive of such a place, thought the concept was too bizarre to exist. But Einstein was wrong, and here you are.
You shouldn’t be here. Surely you will be pulled in. But fear not, dear earthling: Your brain has taken millions of years to get here, and it’s ready for this gaze into the darkness. So let’s get started.
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It swallows up everything too close, too slow or too small to fight its gravitational force. With every planet, gas, star or bit of mass consumed, the black hole grows.
The edge of a black hole, its event horizon, is the point of no return. At the event horizon, light is drawn in to a black hole, never to escape. And nothing is faster than light.
Will gravity rip you apart and crush you into the black hole’s core? Or will a firewall of energy sizzle you into oblivion? Could some essence of you ever emerge from a black hole? The question of how you would die inside a black hole is one of the biggest debates in physics. Called the firewall paradox, it was posited in March 2012 by a group of theorists including Donald Marolf, Ahmed Almheiri, James Sully and Joseph Polchinski.
Based on the mathematics in Einstein’s general theory of relativity of 1915, you would fall through the event horizon unscathed, then the force of gravity would pull you into a noodle and ultimately cram you into singularity, the black hole’s infinitely dense core.
But Dr. Polchinski and his team pitted Einstein against quantum theory, which posited that an event horizon is a blazing firewall of energy that would torch your body to smithereens. However, the presence of a firewall would violate the precious principles of relativity, which decreed the existence of black holes. And so physics is stuck.
Either someone is wrong, or we have to admit that earthlings still aren’t equipped to understand the universe. The firewall paradox calls into question the most definitive theories of science. The insights and wisdom of Einstein, Polchinski or Stephen Hawking notwithstanding, everything we know about the universe could change if we could know for certain what happens to information inside a black hole.
In 2003, an international team led by the X-ray astronomer Andrew Fabian discovered the longest, oldest, lowest note in the universe — a black hole’s song — using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory.
