Can You Survive In A Black Hole?! DEBUNKED

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Wait until you learn that a ton of lead and a ton of feathers weigh the same. Mind blown.

👍︎︎ 18 👤︎︎ u/Lokfuhrer 📅︎︎ Jun 10 2019 🗫︎ replies

Same mass, sure, but the size of a black hole with the mass of the sun would be about 2 miles across. A black hole the size of the sun would destroy this solar system; it would have about 236,000 times the mass of the sun.

👍︎︎ 8 👤︎︎ u/SaulsAll 📅︎︎ Jun 10 2019 🗫︎ replies

Is one solar mass enough to cause a black hole?

👍︎︎ 1 👤︎︎ u/joescott2176 📅︎︎ Jun 10 2019 🗫︎ replies

Kinda like "if everything in the universe suddenly doubled in size nobody would notice any difference because proportionally nothing changed"

👍︎︎ 1 👤︎︎ u/Xszit 📅︎︎ Jun 10 2019 🗫︎ replies
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Except for an extremely small number of lucky astronauts or the billionaire customers of Elon Musk, most of us won't get the chance to escape Earth. But even though we're stuck down here, everyone knows there are certain things you want to avoid up there. Don't get blown out of an airlock, never vomit inside your helmet and avoid going into a black hole, because once you’re in you're not getting back out again. It's impossible for anything to escape one of those things. Even light. They’re essentially the universe's ultimate prison. In fact, black holes are probably one of the most weird and brain melting things in existence. The physicist who invented the term black hole, John A. Wheeler, said they teach us… "THAT SPACE CAN BE CRUMPLED LIKE A PIECE OF PAPER INTO AN INFINITESIMAL DOT, THAT TIME CAN BE EXTINGUISHED LIKE A BLOWN-OUT FLAME, AND THAT THE LAWS OF PHYSICS THAT WE REGARD AS 'SACRED', AS IMMUTABLE, ARE ANYTHING BUT". JOHN A. WHEELER | THEORETICAL PHYSICIST So while black holes might make us question everything we’ve ever believed in and give the biggest brains on the planet something of a headache, there’s one thing everyone agrees on, you can’t get out of one. Neil deGrasse Tyson put it pretty simply, “LIGHT DOESN’T COME OUT, NOTHING COMES OUT. IF YOU FALL IN, YOU DON’T COME OUT.” NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON | ASTROPHYSICIST But is this really true, can nothing, absolutely nothing, escape from a black hole? I’m Stu, this is Debunked, where we sort the truths from the myths and the facts from the misconceptions. This video is made possible with the support of ‘Brilliant.org’! A problem solving site and app that aims to develop your scientific thinking. Before we can truly understand whether anything can escape the clutches of a black hole, we need to understand what these monsters are and how they work. Well, to put it simply, a black hole is basically a point in space that can seemingly devour everything in its path. And, once they’ve gobbled something up, their gravitational pull is so strong that there’s no chance of that intergalactic meal ever being seen again. And, while we're on the subject of hungry black holes, a lot of you might have heard that black holes just suck everything up, like a massive vacuum cleaner. Well that’s not what happens, Black holes aren't sucking at all. What actually occurs, is that things fall into the black hole as a result of its gravity. Think of it this way. You've got a really old satellite, well past its sell by date, let's call it Sputnik. It's time for Sputnik to retire and come back down to Earth. Now, you wouldn't describe the Earth as sucking that satellite down, rather the satellite is falling to Earth, because of gravity. It's the same for a black hole, if an object gets close enough to it, then gravity will cause it to fall in. If you're still not convinced, let's swap out the sun with a black hole of the same mass. If anyone was expecting a quick death and some crushing apocalypse, I've got some good news, that’s not what would happen. The black hole would exert the same gravity as the Sun, so the planets keep orbiting as normal. There’s no huge suck in the solar system pulling everything in. If anything, you can expect a slow death and a freezing apocalypse instead, because no Sun, means no heat, means no humans. But just how powerful can a black hole’s gravity be? Well, light, travelling at a whopping 1.07 billion kilometres per hour, can't get away from these gargantuan gravitational forces once its got too close.. And as we all know, you can’t travel faster than the speed of light, so once something is in a black hole, it’s staying there. That all sounds pretty scary but not as scary as the fact that, technically, anyone of us watching this video could become a black hole ourselves. All you’d have to do is compress yourself into a really tiny space… really tiny. Take an average human, compress them down to a size much smaller than an atom's nucleus (10-23 cm) and they’ll be dead. Sure. But their mass would now be dense enough to produce gravity so strong that light wouldn’t be able to escape – in other words you’ve got yourself... a black hole. Every object has something known as a Schwarzschild radius. This is the space that, should you manage to compress the object's mass into it, then you’d create a gravity so strong that light can’t escape. Collapse the Earth down so its got an 8.7 millimetre radius, making it roughly the size of a peanut, and you’ve guessed it, you’ve created a black hole. Fortunately, black holes aren’t created by collapsing planets or people, usually they’re formed by collapsing stars. Big stars too, ones that start out with a mass around 25 times that of our own Sun. When one of these larger stars runs out of fuel, it collapses in on itself, forming a black hole. This type of black hole is not only incredibly dense, they’re also incredibly common. According to the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, our galaxy, the Milky Way, contains a few hundred million of them. And right at the centre of the Milky Way, is thought to be another type of black hole altogether, a supermassive black hole. Scientists aren’t exactly sure how these black holes form, but they’re confident that these behemoths sit in the centre of pretty much every galaxy, not just our own. And they keep gaining mass from the nearby dust and gas found in the heart of most galaxies. Now, you’re probably wondering what supermassive even means. Okay, so if the mass of our sun is 2 nonillion kilograms – that’s a lot of zeros. Well, a supermassive black hole can be billions of times more massive than that, meaning we’re talking about billions of nonillions of kilograms. Let’s take the supermassive black hole that’s closest to home, Sagittarius A* (Sagittarius A-Star), slap bang in the middle of the Milky Way. Its mass is the equivalent of 4 million suns but its diameter is just 17 times larger - in other words, these supermassive black holes are super dense. Now it might seem reasonable to assume that all that mass is evenly distributed throughout the black sphere, but those billions of nonillions of kilograms are squeezed into a point that is so small, it is actually impossible to measure, and is known as the singularity. Now this obviously doesn’t show us much, so if we take a cross section and flip it around... the Singularity would look like this. This point sits deep inside the black hole, leading to infinite density and gravity. Understandably gravity that strong can stop everything from escaping its clutches, even if the object is travelling at the universe’s top speed, the speed of light. So, if you were able to look directly at a black hole, what would you see? Well, you wouldn’t be viewing the singularity that makes the black hole, instead you’d be looking at the black hole’s event horizon. This is the boundary or edge of the black hole, and once something has crossed that line and gone past the event horizon, into the black hole, then it’s game over. There’s no getting out, because you’d need to travel at or above the speed of light to do so, which I’m afraid is just impossible. Even if you got close to a black hole’s event horizon, it’s important to remember that you couldn’t see anything going on inside because literally nothing can escape out through that barrier. For people on the outside trying to look in, you'd just see a black void, which, depending on how close you were, could be a tiny black ball or a huge void filling your field of vision. However, that doesn’t mean there isn’t a load of other cool stuff going on outside the black hole. What you’d see here is a swirling ring of gas and dust that’s gathered there because of the hole’s incredible gravity. This so-called accretion disc circles the black hole and is slowly consumed by it, a bit like water circling a drain, but because of the incredible friction generated by the unfathomable speeds, those bits of material are heated to billions of degrees, releasing radiation and glowing incredibly brightly. This process can lead to something known as a quasar. For example, a supermassive black hole with a mass two billion times that of the Sun, led to a quasar which gave off an extreme amount of light. How extreme? 60 trillion times more light than our Sun. So, while the black hole itself is completely devoid of light, their existence can help produce some of the brightest objects in the entire universe. And while we’re on the subject of black holes and light, because they’re so massive their gravity can warp space-time. What this means in practice, is that light coming from objects behind a black hole would be bent, distorted or magnified. This phenomenon is called gravitational lensing and is a bit like looking at the universe using a funhouse mirror. Let’s say you were on Earth, doing a bit of star gazing and you spot a bright light source somewhere on the other side of the universe. It just looks like a white dot in the sky, but if a black hole were to somehow pass between the Earth and the dot, you’d see something like this. When the black hole was directly in front of the dot, the small but solid dot would appear to become a larger hollow circle. In truth, nothing has changed, it’s still a bright spot but the black holes gravity has distorted light so much that it looks completely different to us. But enough of what’s going on outside the black hole, what everyone wants to know is what would happen if you booked a one-way ticket and went inside? Essentially... you’d die, but how you’d die is still up for debate. Let’s look at scenario 1. You’ve jumped into the black hole feet first, which means your feet are closer to the singularity than your head. In other words, the bottom part of your body will be subject to stronger gravitational forces than the top part, and the difference between those forces will become even greater the closer you get to the singularity. Scientists refer to these differences in force as tidal forces, and the result of them on the human body isn’t good. You’d slowly be stretched from toe to head and squished inward at the sides, basically creating a human-flavoured piece of spaghetti. Hence why this process is called spaghettification. Put more simply, the tidal forces will rip you apart, breaking down every molecule of your existence. Weirdly though, smaller black holes would kill you faster than a supermassive one. This might seem counterintuitive, but with a small black hole you’re a lot closer to the singularity, so those tidal forces start to have an effect much earlier. In fact, they could kill you before you’d even crossed the event horizon. Oddly, with a supermassive black hole you could cross the event horizon and survive for a while before being turned into a noodle. But that’s just one theory about death by black hole. Time for scenario 2, first put forward in 2012 by physicists Ahmed Almheiri, Donald Marolf, Joe Polchinski and James Scully. According to them, someone falling into a black hole would be incinerated by a huge firewall made up of ultra-high energy particles as they made their way across the event horizon. This relatively new idea isn’t exactly popular in the scientific community. Raphael Bousso, a physicist at the University of California, Berkeley, said “A FIREWALL SIMPLY CAN’T APPEAR IN EMPTY SPACE, ANY MORE THAN A BRICK CAN SUDDENLY APPEAR IN AN EMPTY FIELD AND SMACK YOU IN THE FACE”. RAPHAEL BOUSSO | PHYSICIST | UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY However, despite some reservations about this new theory, scientists have yet to disprove the idea. One thing is clear however, you are going to die. And it’s not going to be pretty. So, crossing the event horizon wasn’t the best idea. Let’s rewind and this time, maybe you trick an enemy, let’s call them Darth, into taking a journey to a black hole. What would you see as he unsuspectingly got closer and closer to his final destination? As we’ve learnt, black holes can warp light, but they can also do some pretty strange things to time as well. As you watched Darth fall ever closer to the black hole he’d appear to be moving increasingly slowly and his watch would tick more slowly than yours. Also, you’d never actually see him cross over the event horizon, instead he’d just grind to a stop, in a kind of suspended animation, right on the edge of the black hole. Because of the extreme gravity, any light coming from Darth would be shifted to the red end of the spectrum, making him seem red as he got closer to the black hole. Eventually he’d just get dimmer and dimmer and fade away, and according to you, he never actually makes it across the event horizon. But he does make it, and then he’s either turned into spaghetti or barbecued by radiation. Thankfully Darth is never coming back, well unless Disney come up with a really convoluted plot device. But, it doesn’t matter who you are, you can't escape a black hole. Renowned physicist Kip Thorne, who helped consult on the film Interstellar, sums up black holes as: “A HOLE IN SPACE WITH A DEFINITE EDGE OVER WHICH ANYTHING CAN FALL AND NOTHING CAN ESCAPE” KIP THORNE - THEORETICAL PHYSICIST But, here's the thing, this isn't strictly true. Okay, bear with me, because we're going to have to leap very briefly into some quantum theory. According to this, empty space isn't totally empty. Here virtual particles can pop in and out of existence in extremely short time frames. These particle-antiparticle pairs usually just annihilate each other. For example, a positron, a particle of antimatter, will annihilate an electron. This is happening all the time, but something weird can happen when these virtual particles pop into existence around a black hole. We already know that nothing can escape from inside the event horizon, and that’s true when these particles spawn inside a black hole. They’re stuck there for a moment before annihilating each other as usual. However, sometimes, outside of the hole, one half of these particle pairs can pop into existence and then fall into the event horizon, while the other half escapes off into the universe. This process is called Hawking radiation and slowly causes the black hole to evaporate, since it is losing energy. I’m talking seriously slowly though, for Sagittarius A*, our neighbouring supermassive black hole, it would take 10^87 years before it evaporated away. That’s 1 octovigintillion years, and no, that’s not a made up number! IT’S 87 ZEROS! Although we should point out that Hawking radiation hasn’t actually been observed yet, it’s only been predicted by the late great Stephen Hawking. And even if it is proven true, technically, those particles are never inside the black hole just the edge of the event horizon, so even Hawking radiation doesn’t break the rule that nothing can escape from a black hole. However, it does change one thing about how we perceive black holes – they’re probably not totally black, since they emit radiation. Then again the name ‘almost black holes’ doesn’t have the same ring to it. If you enjoyed this video then please help support us by visiting our sponsors at Brilliant.org/debunked and signing up for a free account where you can access a supermassive amount of puzzles and challenges that will help build on your problem solving skills. And why not test your knowledge with their quizzes on Black Holes and the Life Cycle of Stars! Brilliant are offering the first 200 subscribers a 20% discount to access the premium content too! So if you want to learn even more about black holes and have more fun with time than a crazy scientist driving a DeLorean then checkout Brilliant’s Premium stuff too! The support from partners like Brilliant is how we can keep making videos, so if you enjoy our content head on over and check out their incredible resources! Thanks for everything and we’ll see you next.
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Channel: Debunked
Views: 225,132
Rating: 4.8268876 out of 5
Keywords: escape a black hole, nearest black hole, in a black hole, lost in space, inside a black hole, black hole, debunked, debunk, event horizon, hawking, quasar, myths, physics, facts, explained, myth busters, urban legend, black holes, space, nasa, science, conspiracy, universe, wormhole, supermassive black hole, black hole photo, fall into a black hole, in a nutshell, blackhole, survive, kurzgesagt, interstellar, learn, infographics, understanding, astrophysics, what happens, what if, mystery, mysterious
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Length: 16min 29sec (989 seconds)
Published: Sun May 19 2019
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