note To an external observer, anyone or anything entering the event horizon would cease moving, then slowly fade away, as the last of the light reflecting off them is then red-shifted to invisibility over a long period of time. Relativistic time dilation tends to be ignored a character voyaging into a black hole can leave it without time warping, while those outside can see things enter a black hole without slowing to a crawl. Sometimes a black hole will be completely flat, apparently forgetting that our universe is 3D. Also commonly, a black hole will be represented as an actual hole in space and it will be perfectly possible to enter a black hole and leave it safely. This can range from whole planets to just the Big Bad of the story (and in those cases, the black hole conveniently closes after swallowing him). Sometimes they just suck in everything around them like giant space-vacuum-cleaners, seeing as Gravity Sucks. At least they have a rather well defined list of things they can and can't do. Scary, yet deeply fascinating and mystifying things. Needless to say, black holes are pretty scary things. For example, if the sun were to suddenly be magically converted into a black hole of the same mass, the earth's orbit would continue on exactly as before, completely unaffected (gravitationally, that is the lack of heat and light would, of course, rapidly end almost all life).Įven orbiting a black hole wouldn't be a safe place for organic lifeforms, as you would be constantly pelted with orbiting dust and debris flying at ludicrous speeds, all while simultaneously being cooked alive and having your DNA melted by the incredible temperatures and intense emissions of radiation, including X-rays and Gamma rays.

note For a nice size comparison, see this video. star, only the black hole would be much smaller. And then Hawking's radiation would actually make the thing pretty bright. From far away enough, in a stable orbit, being near a black hole would just be the same as orbiting a massive, invisible note The gravitational lensing effect is hard to overlook so the black hole would appear as a silhouette against the stars see the Other Wiki for a simulation thereof. Unfortunate items which do fall in are spaghettified (the official scientific term), stretched thin by tidal forces, the black hole ripping individual molecules apart. The event horizon (or Schwarzschild radius) is the boundary within which this condition is met. note A black hole is any object which has an escape velocity that is greater than the speed of light. well, nothing (but they do have a lot of mass) and nothing, not even light, can travel fast enough to escape them. They're the most terrifying things in the known universe.

Fall into a black hole animation