![]() ![]() At this point, you could still attempt a grand escape. “People have theorized that you could probably have entire solar systems living inside this area,” Rodriguez says. This is the region just outside the event horizon where space itself spins with the black hole. If you’re still uneasy about crossing over into (almost) certain oblivion, you can also probe the black hole’s ergosphere. The team recently released additional images (see above) that reveal the pace at which M87* gobbles up its surroundings and display the web-like structure of magnetic field lines, which swirl around the black hole and shape massive jets of energetic particles emanating from its center. Using a technique called very long baseline interferometry, eight synchronized ground-based radio observatories around the world formed, in essence, one Earth-sized radio telescope powerful enough to make high-resolution observations roughly 4,000 times those of the Hubble Space Telescope. The groundbreaking snapshot of M87*, the supermassive black hole at the center of the M87 galaxy about 55 million light-years away from Earth, was a product of the Event Horizon Telescope, an international collaboration between over 200 researchers. The Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration So, How Do Scientists Really Study Black Holes? But if pressed for options, says Levin, you could attempt to enter one of these black holes perpendicular to the disk, far from the edge of the fiery ring. ![]() Magnetic fields this strong would shut down your nervous system and stretch your atoms into skinny rods until you dissolve. They can heat up to millions of degrees and create “some of the largest magnetic fields that we’ve measured,” says Leo Rodriguez, Ph.D., a theoretical physicist at Grinnell College in Iowa. ![]() About 1 percent of supermassive black holes accumulate these fast-spinning rings of matter. Next, avoid black holes with accretion disks. In the biggest black holes, Levin adds, “you might be able to make it for a year before you are ultimately demolished in the center.” You would simply float across, and keep floating, for a while. You’d be so far from the singularity when you crossed the event horizon-about 12 billion miles-that it would be “as unspectacular as stepping into the shadow of a tree,” Levin says. Instead, you should aim for a supermassive black hole, like the one within M87, which is over 3 million times wider than Earth. The change in gravity even before the event horizon would be so steep that you’d get steadily stretched from head to toe in a process irreverently called spaghettification. This means if you hopped into a small black hole-say, 100 miles across-you’d enter relatively close to its point of infinite gravity. Or Even Holes.Īs matter gets packed into a black hole’s central singularity, its event horizon grows. ![]()
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