A guide to outer space - What if we travel to the black hole?

Written by Charlotte Zhang

Imagine you are the first human to travel to a black hole, we are using a tele-porter to travel to the nearest blackhole quickly. Alright, buckle up, and let’s have a wild ride! First of all, we have to locate our destination: the nearest blackhole is called the V616 Monocerotis, ( 3000-3500 light years away ).

Spaghettification

Finally, we are here. Now, do you feel it? The gravitational pull on our feet will be stronger than our head. Therefore we will be stretched into a long, thin stream of plasma. This is called Spaghettification. What am I seeing?

Einstein ring and photon sphere

Just outside the photon sphere is the Einstein Ring! Because the pull is so strong, not even light can escape the black hole’s event horizon, so the Einstein Ring is formed by the light of distant stars. If we go in further, we will reach the photon sphere, where light itself orbits the black hole. Now try to look to your side, cool, isn’t it? You can literally see the back of your own head due to the lights travelling in a circle around the sphere! 

Accretion disk

You feel the radiation? This is immediately outside the event horizon, most black holes are surrounded by an accretion disk (spinning ring of hot gas) they are heated to millions of degrees. It is a massive, swirling ring of gas, dust, and plasma that orbits a black hole before being consumed. While the black hole itself is invisible, these disks are some of the brightest objects in the universe. 

Plunge region

At this moment, we have reached ISCO (The plunge region), it is the innermost stable circular orbit. Once matter passes this point, they would no longer maintain a stable orbit( A predictable repeating path an object takes around a larger body without crashing and flying away) and it would plunge straight to the event horizon like water over a waterfall.

The point of no return

Here we are in the event horizon along with that matter, this is the point of no return, not even light can escape..the universe behind us will fade to black while our only possible future is the collision with the center.

A black hole is mysterious yet dangerous — a place where the known laws of physics begin to collapse, where space and time lose their familiar meaning, and where not even light can escape. Gravity becomes so extreme that our current theories struggle to fully explain what happens. It reminds us that the universe contains far more than we understand, and that black holes may be only one example of the many unknown forces still hidden in the cosmos.