What If You Traveled to a Black Hole?

WHAT IF

1/12/2024

Would this be a trip to remember?

Transcript

00:00 Black holes aren't exactly a popular vacation destination.

00:06 They feed on anything and everything

00:09 that comes into the vicinity.

00:13 They're dense and unpredictably volatile.

00:17 And they don't let anything,

00:19 I mean anything,

00:20 escape their gravitational grasp.

00:24 Going to the event horizon of a black hole

00:27 would be a very daring, dangerous experience.

00:31 Let's get to it already.

00:34 Not all black holes are the same.

00:46 Some of them are relatively small,

00:48 reaching only 10 to 20 times the mass of our Sun.

00:52 There are millions of them in the Milky Way alone.

00:57 Then there are truly gravitational giants,

01:01 supermassive black holes.

01:03 And they aren't called supermassive for nothing.

01:08 They can grow millions of times the mass of our Sun.

01:12 And they're lurking at the center of almost every galaxy,

01:16 including our own.

01:20 Choosing a black hole to travel to

01:22 is the first thing you'd need to do

01:23 before jumping into a spaceship.

01:27 Where would you find yourself a black hole

01:29 that wouldn't gobble you up

01:30 the second you arrive in its territory?

01:33 And how close could you get to one

01:36 before it squeezed and stretched

01:39 and turned you into spaghetti?

01:43 I hope you've seen enough what-if stories by now

01:46 to know that a black hole

01:48 isn't something you can see with your own eyes.

01:51 What you would see is stars collapsing into it.

01:55 Because black holes swallow everything

01:58 they can reach with their gravity,

02:00 they're especially hard to catch on camera.

02:04 This is the first and only picture

02:07 of a black hole we have so far.

02:09 It shows the orbit of photons

02:12 around a supermassive black hole

02:13 in the galaxy Messier 87.

02:17 And it took eight huge telescopes across the Earth,

02:20 five days of observing,

02:22 and two years of combining the signals together

02:25 to produce this one image.

02:28 So maybe you won't need to bring your camera with you this time.

02:32 Okay, now let me pick a black hole for you.

02:35 I suggest the nearest one,

02:37 V616 Monocerotis,

02:40 or simply V616 Mon.

02:44 It's only 3,000 light-years away,

02:47 and it has the mass of 9 to 13 times that of our Sun.

02:52 Now, even if you could thrust through space

02:55 at the speed of light,

02:56 it would still take you 3,000 years

02:58 to reach V616 Mon.

03:01 Our Universe is just too enormous to travel around.

03:05 That means only one thing.

03:07 You'd have to jump to thousands of years into the future

03:10 where there might be the technology

03:12 to get close enough to your destination.

03:16 But no, it's not time for that "what if" story just yet.

03:20 Let's keep heading towards V616 Mon.

03:23 This is where the fun part begins.

03:26 As you're heading towards V616 Mon,

03:29 even as you're light-years away from it,

03:31 you'd start feeling the black hole's effects.

03:34 Better put your shades on,

03:36 because while black holes don't emit any light,

03:40 they attract a lot of stars.

03:42 It would be a non-stop cascade of light,

03:45 and according to Stephen Hawking,

03:47 there would be radiation too.

03:50 It would also be getting quite hot.

03:53 Black holes are freezing cold on the inside.

03:57 Some black holes' internal temperature

03:59 could drop to only 1/1,000,000th of a degree

04:02 above absolute zero.

04:04 But on the outside,

04:06 black holes have neutrino particles

04:09 constantly colliding with each other

04:10 and radioactively heating their surroundings

04:13 to millions of degrees.

04:16 This is the part where you should be totally toasted.

04:19 But I don't want to stop the story

04:21 from getting to its destination.

04:23 You've already traveled thousands of light-years.

04:26 What's a little heat anyway?

04:28 Can you hear me?

04:32 Sorry, I forgot to mention

04:34 the clouds of radiation and particles.

04:37 These clouds of Hawking radiation

04:39 would also be forming magnetic fields,

04:42 throwing debris around at the speed of light.

04:46 How much closer could you get to the black hole?

04:51 After all, you don't want to fall into it.

04:54 Just visit.

04:56 Let's see.

04:56 The distance between a black hole's event horizon

05:00 and its singularity

05:01 is referred to as its Schwarzschild radius,

05:04 after the German physicist and astronomer

05:06 Karl Schwarzschild.

05:09 The Schwarzschild radius defines the size

05:11 of a black hole's event horizon,

05:13 a boundary beyond which you wouldn't be affected

05:16 by a black hole,

05:17 as long as you stay on the opposite side of it.

05:21 The closest you could get to a black hole

05:22 without being sucked in

05:24 would be two times the Schwarzschild radius.

05:27 But if you're looking to observe from a stable orbit,

05:31 you'd better stay a distance of

05:33 three times the Schwarzschild radius.

05:36 And if you wanted to get back home safely,

05:40 this is about as far as you could go.

05:43 Coming any closer to a black hole

05:44 would start spaghettifying you

05:46 at an increasing rate.

05:48 But that's a story for another WHAT IF.

05:53 ♪ MUSIC ♪

What If You Traveled to a Black Hole?

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