Movies Are Wrong - Why You Can't Fall Into a Black Hole Even If You Tried | Black Holes 6

How the universe works: a black hole is surprisingly hard to fall into.

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Image Credits: NASA/ESA/ESO

[DeathbyProxy]

When I was a kid for some reason I was obsessed with the idea of falling into a black hole. For a while every story I wrote involved a character falling into a black hole or nearly falling into a black hole. Childhood dreams crushed!

[russellcurtis]

I remember reading about this. There’s a blazar (a super bright quazar) that has been discovered that’s 600 trillion times brighter than the sun. To give some perspective, if you were 390 *light years* away from it, it would appear as bright as the sun does from earth. You could get a tan. Meanwhile, the sun becomes invisible to the naked eye when you get about 30 light years away.

[MrClickity]

One small note: Einstein didn't discover that the speed of light was constant. That was well known before he came along. What he did was build a model of physics that took that constant into account.

[cmilkau]

The crucial assumption though is, that it's completely free fall. With just small course corrections on you way, it's actually quite easy to hit the event horizon. The more precision you have, the less dV you need.
The main problem is getting there.

If you are small, and the black hole is big, even if you fall at an angle, you will not become an accretion disk. This is because you first have to be broken apart by tidal forces, but when it comes to large black holes (like those at the centres of galaxies), tidal forces are not very strong near the event horizon (at least not for small objects). So you will be well inside one when you start to feel the stretching and the spaghettification.

Of course, if you're big like a star, you are going to feel the tidal effects much sooner. So a star falling into a black hole will almost inevitably produce an accretion disk, unless it falls straight. But something small, like a spaceship won't if the black hole is large enough.

That said, stellar black holes are tiny, their Schwarzschild radius is only a dozen kilometres or so, so you would would definitely become a spaghetti-like stream of particles before ever getting close to the event horizon. And if that stream of particles misses the black hole by even a little, it will become an accretion disk.

[andmicbro]

Black holes are some of the most extreme objects in the universe, and I'm always blown away discovering some new way in which they prove just how extreme they are. Fascinating watch!

[danieljensen]

Really it just comes down to orbital mechanics. It's difficult to fall into any massive body (especially without an atmosphere to cause drag) because any slight velocity you have starting out that isn't directly towards the center will cause you to miss and go into orbit instead. And in many cases (like living on Earth) you're already starting from an orbit, so you have to lose 100% of your orbital velocity in order to fall into the thing you're orbiting.

[idek]

Recently found this channel, and I've fallen in love with this content!

Keep up the work!!

[Chris.Davies]

Falling into the Sun is also very difficult, too, due to having to lose all velocity relative to it.

[andrebartels]

Your fantastic way of narrating such complicated topics so that they are easily understandable, and your friendly tone earned you my subscription. I've watched your video about Pluto and this one, and they're both exceptionally good. I'm looking forward to your other videos 🤓👍

[psyonik]

Speed of a black hole's particle jets is not, "near relativistic speeds, " it's definitely relativistic. Black holes eject matter at their poles from their accretion disks at over 99% of c. Aside from that minor detail, it was a great video.

[TheLycanStrain]

Something that I knew about but never gave it much thought: the conservation of angular momentum would make it damn hard to fall into a black hole unless you were aimed perpendicular to the event horizon, and that's very unlikely.

Really it's a worse fate to miss then spaghettification is - you get irradiated with a lethal dose of gammas and then you have to suffer that death because it'll take too long for the black hole to get you

[virtone]

To fall into a black hole would be tricky at best. If it weren't spinning or moving sideways relative to you, you'd have to aim very carefully, setting up your trajectory from a long ways away. Once you got closer, even making a very minor course correction would require more energy than you'd be able to muster. Add in spin and frame-dragging, and that would make calculating the correct course difficult. And then you run into time dilation which would cause you to experience a slow-down as you got close to the black hole. This effect would start farther out for a larger black hole, like the one at the center of a galaxy, Of course you personally wouldn't notice this, but any observer would see your progress slow and basically stop. It might take tens of thousands of years for you to get to the black hole, but you'd experience a fairly short trip. Though I don't know if you'd run out of supplies or die of old age first, that'll be an exercise for the reader ;) Regardless, you'd appear to be needing to make course corrections probably on the way in unless you somehow knew in advance the correct trajectory, and I don't think you'd have the energy and propellant for that. If you missed, you'd get mixed up with whatever else is in the accretion disc and as mentioned, get turned into plasma. Actually, even if you DID get on the right trajectory, you'd probably get fried by the plasma around the black hole as you went in.

But whatever you end up experiencing, you definitely aren't going to survive it.

[yendorelrae]

I treasure your science content, truly top five of all black hole 10-15 minute education videos out there (so excited it has been expanded to 6 now!) Great visuals and explanation through excellent info in narration!

[JoeMama-ncbw]

As much as I love and appreciate the in depth explanation, a simple comparison to solar or lunar bodies getting caught in an uneven orbit and eventually crashing into whatever they orbited would’ve sufficed tbh. Was nice to see the similarities of our seemingly simple worldly physics to those of the void.

[TimothyStovall]

I've had a few "dreams" of black holes, but the most awesome one was where I was traveling through space with just my body sight seeing the galaxy, and made my way to the center to the super massive black hole our whole galaxy orbits around. As I got closer I started to speed up, and started a trajectory that had me orbit the black hole, then get slung out the relativistic jet towards the Andromeda Galaxy. It was quite a sight to behold. Wish I could record my dreams and share them. lol

[jamesabber]

Ah, angular momentum. Reminds me when I was at high school about 40 years ago. The school had a computer, and our physics teacher gave us an optional task of programming a simulation of two bodies in gravity on the computer. I did it, and was praised for my answer.

But I thought this could be done analytically, so I started in secret working on a purely analytical solution. But I was unable to come up with a simple formula that would show the positions of the two bodies at any point in time. Frustrated, after trying for about a week, I went to my physics teacher for help. He looked at my work, and simply said: "Angular momentum always has to be preserved. That is what you are missing". I went home, and a few hours later I finally had my analytical solution to the problem.

[dante]

The hardest part to wrap my head around was something you called "walking".
What's that?🤔
I usually just spin the earth below my feets to the place I like

[colbymarks]

Keep it up, you make these topics easy to digest, and extremely informative

[jamesbiering]

Awesome amazing serious on black holes. I knew a lot from other videos and documentaries I've watched and learned new things and saw some the stuff in a better way thanks to your great writing and videos.