What would happen if you entered a black hole?
By Alexandra Sendrea
Who doesn’t love pizza? Most of us have seen dough stretched and kneaded to achieve that perfect fluffy texture. Now, imagine yourself in a similar situation—but you’re slowly stretched and pulled apart bit by bit, atom by atom. Sounds uncomfortable, right? That’s precisely what happens if you venture too close to a black hole, in a process known as "spaghettification." The immense gravitational forces near a black hole are so strong that they stretch objects vertically and compress them horizontally, causing a person or object to be elongated into thin, noodle-like strands; hence called spaghettification. Once thought to be inescapable, black holes were believed to cause anything that entered them to vanish forever.
Black holes are when massive stars collapse under their gravity. They absorb everything in their vicinity—including light. More specifically, the light they absorb is a form of cosmic radiation—electromagnetic radiation that includes not just visible light, but also X-rays, gamma rays, and other forms of energy traveling through space. However, where does that light, or energy, actually go? The gravitational pull of a black hole is so intense that even this high-energy radiation, which travels at the speed of light (300,000 kilometers per second), cannot escape once it crosses the event horizon the “point of no return”. 1 It is not a physical surface, but a sphere surrounding the black hole that marks where the escape velocity is equal to the speed of light. In physics, light is a form of energy traveling in electromagnetic waves, and energy, according to the law of conservation of energy, cannot be created or destroyed—it must be conserved. This leads to a puzzle: If light and other forms of energy are absorbed by black holes where does that energy actually go?
This question ties into the Black Hole Information Paradox in theoretical physics. According to this paradox, black holes annihilate information when they consume matter and radiation. 2 However, this idea contradicts a fundamental principle in physics: information about the state of a system can never be completely lost, even if the system changes form. If information is permanently lost inside a black hole, it would imply a breakdown of the laws of physics. For decades, scientists were baffled by this paradox, fearing that black holes might be cosmic "dead ends" where all information is destroyed.
Recent developments, however, suggest a different story. Some physicists propose that the information absorbed by black holes is not lost forever but rather stored and eventually re-emitted. This theory is rooted in Hawking radiation, a concept developed by physicist Stephen Hawking. According to Hawking, black holes are not completely black but slowly evaporate over time by emitting radiation. As they release this radiation, they are thought to gradually expel the information they absorbed in the form of gravitational waves, although the process by which this happens is still not fully understood. This means that, theoretically, if you were to fall into a black hole, the information that makes up your body—every particle, atom, and bit of data—might not be lost. Instead, it might eventually reemerge over time, though the reconstitution of a person would be far from a straightforward process.
To understand black holes better, scientists have developed cutting-edge observational tools like the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT). This global network of radio telescopes is designed to capture images of black holes by observing the radiation around them. The EHT works by linking multiple telescopes to create a virtual telescope the size of Earth. By combining data from these telescopes, astronomers can peer into the universe with clarity, revealing the first-ever image of a black hole’s event horizon—the boundary beyond which light cannot escape. Sheperd Doeleman, director of the EHT project, explains this process with a striking analogy: "Imagine taking a mirror and smashing it with a hammer, distributing the shards all over the world, recording what happens on each of those shards, and then bringing them together to reconstruct that mirror on a supercomputer. That’s what the Event Horizon Telescope is doing."
In addition to observational breakthroughs, black holes push the boundaries of theoretical physics. For example, physicist Malcolm Perry has worked extensively on the Black Hole Information Paradox. He and his colleagues propose that black holes might not destroy information outright. Instead, they believe black holes store information in subtle ways, perhaps encoding it on the surface of the event horizon itself. One theory involves supertranslations and superrotations, which suggest that black holes aren’t static objects but can "remember" certain aspects of the particles they absorb, even if they seem to obliterate them.
To understand this better, let’s break down these terms. In physics, spin is a fundamental property of particles that can be thought of as the particle’s natural angular momentum—essentially how the particle rotates around itself. However, unlike the everyday concept of spinning (like a spinning top), particle spin is a quantum mechanical property, meaning it exists even for particles that are not physically spinning in space. Spin is often described in terms of half-integers or whole numbers, depending on the type of particle.
The idea of spin memory ties into how black holes interact with spacetime. When a black hole absorbs matter, it can change its own angular momentum—its spin. Some physicists, including Perry, have proposed that this change creates a "memory" in the surrounding spacetime, meaning that the gravitational waves emitted during these interactions leave behind a permanent record. This memory effect, known as spin memory, could be detected as a subtle shift in the gravitational field around a black hole.
Furthermore, the conservation of superrotation charge is related to how spacetime itself can be altered by these spin changes. These charges can shift the black hole’s event horizon when certain kinds of waves or particles are absorbed. The challenge with these ideas is that they suggest that in certain situations, especially in higher dimensions of spacetime (beyond the four we normally experience: three spatial dimensions and one time dimension), the effects we observe in four dimensions might not exist or might be altered.
In conclusion, we are only beginning to understand black holes, acknowledging that they are not the eraser we once thought to be. Watching a documentary on Netflix called “Black Holes| The Edge of All We Know” inspired me to write this article.
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