Would this be a trip to remember?
Category
📺
TVTranscript
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 ♪