• Question: Is it mabye possible using the right equiptment to survive a black hole?

    Asked by buddingscientist to Adam, Catherine, Karen, Leila, Nazim on 15 Mar 2012.
    • Photo: Leila Battison

      Leila Battison answered on 15 Mar 2012:

      Probably not, because black holes don’t just affect matter (like people and technology and stuff) but they distort time and space as well. Nasty stuff! I’d just avoid them in your space travels!

    • Photo: Adam Stevens

      Adam Stevens answered on 15 Mar 2012:

      You can easily survive a black hole, you just have to not go past the event horizon. If you actually go into the black hole nothing’s gonna help you, but if you just kid of orbit past you would get a nice view! (of black)

    • Photo: Karen Masters

      Karen Masters answered on 15 Mar 2012:

      One interesting fact – supermassive black holes have really large radii – in fact so large that the tidal forces when you cross the point of no return aren’t that bad, and you’d still be a long way from the singularity (the point at the centre where physics breaks down). You could never come out again, and weird stuff would happen, but I think you might be able to survive crossing into what technically is already a black hole.

      Some odd theories of the Universe suggest it’s one giant black hole (with a singularity beyond the distance that light has had time to travel to us yet). I think we’ve mostly ruled that out, but it’s still fun to think about.

      Definitely avoid stellar mass black holes though. Anywhere close and you’d be ripped into spaghetti like substances by the tidal forces. Yuk! 😉

    • Photo: Nazim Bharmal

      Nazim Bharmal answered on 18 Mar 2012:

      Unlikely because a black hole can change spacetime, so the equipment would have to be “outside” spacetime, which we don’t even know how to do.

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