![]() If you jump into one, you will not be gone for good. Information, they now say with confidence, does escape a black hole. In a series of breakthrough papers, theoretical physicists have come tantalizingly close to resolving the black hole information paradox that has entranced and bedeviled them for nearly 50 years. The work appears to resolve a paradox that Stephen Hawking first described five decades ago. But when we are ready, one of the safest passageways might be the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy called Sagittarius A*, and it might just be our ticket out of the Milky Way.In a landmark series of calculations, physicists have proved that black holes can shed information, which seems impossible by definition. ![]() Scientists say more research is needed before we're anywhere close to successfully traveling through a black hole. He says one possibility is that we'd arrive at some other remote part of our galaxy, potentially light years away from any planets or stars, b ut a second, and perhaps more intriguing, possibility is that we'd arrive in a different galaxy altogether. Similarly, if you pass through a weak singularity with the right speed and momentum, and at the right time, you may not feel much at all.Īs for what happens once you get through to the other side, n o one really knows, but Burko has his own ideas. ![]() If you hold your finger in the flame long enough, you'll get burned, b ut pass your finger through quickly, and you'll barely feel a thing. Narrator: He added that passing through a weak singularity is like quickly running your finger through a candle flame that's 1,000 degrees Celsius. It would just go through you too quickly." It's just that you don't have enough time to respond to the very strong forces. Lior Burko: " You would feel a slight increase in temperature, but it would not be a dramatic increase. Therefore, scientists instead run computer simulations to see what would happen if we did manage to reach an isolated, rotating black hole, a nd now, for the first time, a team of scientists at UMass Dartmouth and Georgia Gwinnett College has done exactly that. In fact, the best place to test this is at the supermassive black hole in the center of our home galaxy, the Milky Way, which is 27,000 light years away. Now, astronomers obviously can't travel through a black hole yet to test this theory. More specifically, through a large, rotating black hole, which is where these types of singularities exist. A nd for decades, scientists thought singularities were all the same, s o anything that passed the event horizon would be destroyed the same way: b y being stretched and pulled like an infinitely long piece of spaghetti.īut that all changed in the early 1990s when different research teams in Canada and the US discovered a second singularity c alled a "mass inflation singularity." It still has a strong gravitational pull, b ut it would only stretch you by a finite amount, and potentially NOT kill you in the process, meaning, you might survive the trip through a black hole. It's what gives black holes their strong gravitational pull. Black holes might be suitable for hyperspace travel, after all i t just takes the right kind of black hole.Īt the center of every black hole is a point of infinite density, called a singularity. And it turns out, some scientists now think the sci-fi buffs may be onto something. But sci-fi films are more optimistic, d epicting black holes as portals through space and time or gateways to other dimensions. Scientists agree that if you travel far enough into a black hole, gravity will eventually become so strong that it kills anything in its path. So, whatever happens beyond that boundary, inside of a black hole, is anyone's guess. ![]() But where reality ends and fiction takes over is at the edge of a black hole - a place called the event horizon, where no spacecraft has ever gone. On the one hand, scientists have seen real black holes in action, consuming unsuspecting stars that pass too close. Narrator: Black holes skirt the line between science fiction and science fact. ![]() Account icon An icon in the shape of a person's head and shoulders. ![]()
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