Bottom line: simply falling into a black hole won't give you a view of the entire future of the universe. Black holes can exist without being part of the final big crunch, and matter can fall into black holes.
Bottom line: simply falling into a black hole won't give you a view of the entire future of the universe. Black holes can exist without being part of the final big crunch, and matter can fall into black holes.
Since nothing can escape from the gravitational force of a black hole, it was long thought that black holes are impossible to destroy. But we now know that black holes actually evaporate, slowly returning their energy to the Universe.
Could we ever see past an event horizon? It is a matter of viewpoint. From that of a distant observer, we never see anything fall into the black hole, i.e., enter the event horizon. The object approaching the event horizon would simply fade away over time and ultimately disappear.
But don't expect a black hole to disappear any time soon. It takes a shockingly long time for a black hole to shed all of its mass as energy via Hawking radiation. It would take 10100 years, or a googol, for a supermassive black hole to fully disappear.
Astronomers have discovered the closest black hole to Earth, the first unambiguous detection of a dormant stellar-mass black hole in the Milky Way. Its close proximity to Earth, a mere 1,600 light-years away, offers an intriguing target of study to advance understanding of the evolution of binary systems.
Beyond the event horizon lies a truly minuscule point called a singularity, where gravity is so intense that it infinitely curves space-time itself. This is where the laws of physics, as we know them, break down, meaning all theories about what lies beyond are just speculation.
At the center of a black hole the gravity is so strong that, according to general relativity, space-time becomes so extremely curved that ultimately the curvature becomes infinite. This results in space-time having a jagged edge, beyond which physics no longer exists -- the singularity.
There is no evidence that the universe has an edge. The part of the universe we can observe from Earth is filled more or less uniformly with galaxies extending in every direction as far as we can see - more than 10 billion light-years, or about 6 billion trillion miles.
A single Black Hole, even one at the center of our Milky Way galaxy, is just too small to eat an entire galaxy.
Authors' example. In their paper, the authors consider a hypothetical example with w = −1.5, H0 = 70 km/s/Mpc, and Ωm = 0.3, in which case the Big Rip would happen approximately 22 billion years from the present.
According to a mind-bending new theory, a black hole is actually a tunnel between universes—a type of wormhole. The matter the black hole attracts doesn't collapse into a single point, as has been predicted, but rather gushes out a "white hole" at the other end of the black one, the theory goes.
As black holes evaporate, they get smaller and smaller and their event horizons get uncomfortably close to the central singularities. In the final moments of black holes' lives, the gravity becomes too strong, and the black holes become too small, for us to properly describe them with our current knowledge.
Because space isn't curved they will never meet or drift away from each other. A flat universe could be infinite: imagine a 2D piece of paper that stretches out forever. But it could also be finite: imagine taking a piece of paper, making a cylinder and joining the ends to make a torus (doughnut) shape.
For all practical purposes the matter has disappeared from the universe. Once inside the black hole's event horizon, matter will be torn apart into its smallest subatomic components and eventually be squeezed into the singularity.
Einstein's theory of general relativity mathematically predicts the existence of wormholes, but none have been discovered to date. A negative mass wormhole might be spotted by the way its gravity affects light that passes by.
The singularity at the center of a black hole is the ultimate no man's land: a place where matter is compressed down to an infinitely tiny point, and all conceptions of time and space completely break down. And it doesn't really exist. Something has to replace the singularity, but we're not exactly sure what.
For all their extraordinary power, black holes are not immortal. They have a life cycle just like we do. Forty years ago Stephen Hawking, the world's foremost expert on black holes, announced that they evaporate and shrink because they emit radiation.
Two supermassive black holes have been spotted feasting on cosmic materials as two galaxies in distant space merge — and are the closest to colliding black holes astronomers have ever observed.
For most space objects, we use light-years to describe their distance. A light-year is the distance light travels in one Earth year. One light-year is about 6 trillion miles (9 trillion km). That is a 6 with 12 zeros behind it!
Light-year is the distance light travels in one year. Light zips through interstellar space at 186,000 miles (300,000 kilometers) per second and 5.88 trillion miles (9.46 trillion kilometers) per year.
Such black hole mergers are one of the rarest events in the universe. But someone furiously rubbing on one rabbit foot after another seems to have brought us incredible luck, as a new study has revealed that we might be able to witness a merge, that too in just three years no less!
The trite answer is that both space and time were created at the big bang about 14 billion years ago, so there is nothing beyond the universe. However, much of the universe exists beyond the observable universe, which is maybe about 90 billion light years across.
A mathematical model reveals that it is possible to create black holes similar to astrophysical black holes in laboratory experiments1,2. The model predicts that a flowing fluid system can mimic the environment around a black hole.