Except for an extremely small number of lucky astronauts or the billionaire customers of Elon Musk,

most of us won't get the chance to escape Earth. But even though we're stuck down here, everyone
knows there are certain things you want to avoid up there. Don't get blown out of an airlock, never
vomit inside your helmet and avoid going into a black hole, because once you’re in you're not getting
back out again. It's impossible for anything to escape a black hole even light. They’re essentially the
universe's ultimate prison. In fact, black holes are probably one of the weirdest and brain melting
things in existence. The physicist who invented the term black hole, John A. Wheeler, said they teach
us "THAT SPACE CAN BE CRUMPLED LIKE A PIECE OF PAPER INTO AN INFINITESIMAL DOT, THAT TIME
CAN BE EXTINGUISHED LIKE A BLOWN-OUT FLAME, AND THAT THE LAWS OF PHYSICS THAT WE
REGARD AS "SACRED", AS IMMUTABLE, ARE ANYTHING BUT".

So while black holes might make us question everything we have ever believed in and give the
biggest brains on the planet something of a headache, there is one thing everyone agrees on, you
can’t get out of one. Neil deGrasse Tyson put it pretty simply, "LIGHT DOES NOT COME OUT,
NOTHING COMES OUT. IF YOU FALL IN, YOU DON’T COME OUT.” But is this really true, can nothing,
absolutely nothing, escape from a black hole?

Before we can truly understand whether anything need to understand anything can escape the
clutches of a black hole, we to understand what these monsters are and how they work. Well, to put
it simply, a black hole is basically a point in space that can seemingly devour everything in its path.
And, once they’ve gobbled something up, their gravitational pull is so strong that is there’s no
chance of that intergalactic meal ever being seen again. And, while we're on the subject of hungry
black holes, a lot of you might have heard that black holes just suck everything up, like a message
vacuum cleaner. Well, that’s not what happens, Black holes aren't sucking at all. What is actually
happening, is that things are falling into the black hole as a result of its gravity. You've got a really old
satellite, well past its sell by date, let's call it Sputnik. It's time for Sputnik to retire and come back
down to Earth. Now, you wouldn't describe the Earth as sucking that satellite down, rather the
satellite is falling to Earth, because of gravity. It's the same for a black hole, if an object gets close
enough to it, then gravity will cause it to fall in. If you're still not convinced, let's swap out the sun
with a black hole of the same mass. If anyone was expecting a quick death and some catching
apocalypse, I have got some good news, that’s not what would happen. The black hole would exert
the same gravity as the sun, show the planets keeps orbiting as normal. There’s no huge suck in the
solar system pulling everything in. If anything, you can expect a slow death and freezing apocalypse
instead, because no Sun, means no heat, means no humans. But just how powerful can a black
hole’s gravity be?

Well, light, travelling at a whopping 1.07 billion km per hour, can't get away from these gargantuan
gravitational forces once it's got to close. And as we all know, you can’t travel faster than the speed
of light, so want something is in a black hole, it’s staying there. That all sounds pretty scary but not
as scary as the fact that, technically, anyone of us watching this video could become a black hole
ourselves. All you’d have to do is compress yourself into a really tiny space. Take an average human,
compress them down to a size much smaller than an atom's nucleus (10-23 cm) and they’ll be dead.
But their mass would now be dense enough to reduced gravity so strong that light would not be able
to escape – in other words you’ve got yourself a black hole.

Every object has something known as a Schwarzschild radius. This is the space that, should you
manage to compress the object's mass into it, then you’d create a gravity so strong that light can’t
escape. Collapse the Earth down so it’s got an 8.7 mm radius, making it the free the size of a peanut,
and you’ve guessed it, you’ve created a black hole.

Fortunately, black holes aren’t created by collecting planets or people, usually they are formed by
collapsing stars. Big stars too, ones that start out with a mass around 25 times that of our own sun.
When one of these larger stars runs out of fuel, it collapses in on itself, forming a black hole. This
type of black hole is not only incredibly dense they also incredibly common.

According to the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for astrophysics, our galaxy, the Milky way, contains a
few hundred million of them. And right at the centre of the Milky Way, is thought to be another type
of black hole altogether, a supermassive black hole. Scientists aren’t exactly sure how these black
holes form, but they are confident that these behemoths sit in the centre of pretty much every
galaxy, not just our own. And they keep gaining mass from the nearby dust and gas found in the
heart of most galaxies.

Now, you’re probably wondering what supermassive even means. Okay, so if the mass of our sun is 2
nonillion kg that is a lot of zeros. Well, a supermassive black hole can be billions of times more
massive than that, meaning we are talking about billions of nonillions of kilograms. Let’s take the
supermassive black hole that’s closest to home, Sagittarius A- Star, slap bang in the middle of the
Milky Way. Its mass is the equivalent of 4 million suns but its diameter is just 17 times larger in other
words, these supermassive black holes are super dense.

Now it might seem reasonable to assume that all that mass is evenly distributed throughout the
black sphere, but those billions of nonillions of Kilograms are squeezed into a point that is so small, it
is actually impossible to measure, and is known as the singularity.

Now this obviously doesn’t show us much, so if we take a cross section and flip it around the
Singularity would look like this. This point sits deep inside the black hole, leading to infinite density
and gravity. Understandably gravity that strong can stop everything from escaping its clutches, even
if the object is travelling at the universe’s top speed, the speed of light. So, if you were able to look
directly at a black hole what would you see?

Well, you wouldn’t be viewing the singularity that makes the black hole, instead you'd be looking at
the black hole’s event horizon.
This is the boundary or edge of the black hole, and once something has crossed that line and gone
past the event horizon, into the black hole, then it's game over. There’s no getting out, because
you’d need to travel at or above the speed of light to do so, which I’m afraid is just impossible. Even
if you got close to a black hole’s event horizon, it's important to remember that you couldn’t see
anything going on inside because literally nothing can escape out through that barrier. For people on
the outside trying to look in, you would just see a black void, which, depending on how close you
were, could be a tiny black ball on a huge void filling you all field of vision.

However, that doesn’t mean there isn’t a load of other cool stuff going on outside the black hole.
What you’d see here is a swirling ring of gas and dust that is gathered there because of the hole’s
incredible gravity. This so-called accretion disc circles the black hole and a slowly consumed by it, a
bit like water circling a drain, but because of the incredible friction generated by the unfathomable
speeds, those bits of material are heated two billion of degrees, releasing radiation and glowing
incredibly brightly. This process can lead to something known as quasar. For example, a
supermassive black hole with a mass to billion times that of the Sun, led to a quasar which gave off
an extreme amount of light. How extreme? 60 trillion times lighter than our Sun. So, while the black
hole itself is completely devoid of light, their existence can help produce some of the brightest
objects in the entire universe.

And while we’re on the subject of black holes and light, because they are so massive their gravity
can warp space-time. What this means in practice, is that light coming from object behind a black
hole would be bent, distorted or magnified. This phenomenon is called gravitational lensing and is a
bit like looking at the universe using a fun house mirror.

Let’s say you were on Earth, doing a bit of stargazing and you spot a bright light source somewhere
on the other side of the universe. It just looks like a white dot in the sky, but if a black hole were to
somehow pass between the Earth and the dot, you’d see something like miracle. When the black
hole was directly in front of the dot, the small but solid dot would appear to become a larger hollow
circle. In truth, nothing has changed, it’s still a bright spot but the black holes gravity has distorted
light so much that it looks completely different to us. But enough of what’s going on outside the
black hole, what everyone wants to know is what would happen if you booked a one-way ticket and
went inside?

Essentially... you’d die, but how you’d is still up for debate.

Let's look at Case 1

You’ve jumped into the black hole feet first, which means your feet are closer to the singularity than
your head. In other words, the bottom part of your body will be subject to strong gravitational forces
than the top part, and the difference between those forces will become even greater the closer you
get to the singularity. Scientists refer to these differences in force as tidal forces, and the result of
them on the human body is not good. You’d slowly be stretched from toe to head and squished
inward at the sides, basically creating a human- flavoured piece of spaghetti. Hence why this process
is called spaghettification. Put more simply, the tidal forces will rip you apart, breaking down every
molecule of your existence. Weirdly though, smaller black holes would kill you faster than a
supermassive one. This might seem counterintuitive, but with a small black hole you are a lot closer
to the singularity, so those tidal forces start to have an effect much earlier. In fact, they could kill you
before you’d even crossed the event horizon. Oddly, with a supermassive black hole you good cross
the event horizon and survive for a while before being turned into a noodle. But that’s just one
theory about death by black hole.

Case 2

first put forward in 2012 by physicist Mohammed Alhmeri, Donald Marolf, Joe Polchinski and James
Scully. According to them, someone falling into a black hole would be incinerated bi a huge firewall
made up of ultra-high energy particles as they made their way across the event horizon. This
relatively new idea isn’t exactly popular in the scientific community. Raphael Bousso, a physicist at
the University Bosch California, Berkeley, said “A FIREWALL SIMPLY CAN’T APPEAR IN EMPTY SPACE,
ANY MORE THAN A BRICK CAN SUDDENLY APPEAR IN AN EMPTY FIELD AND SMACK YOU IN THE
FACE”.

However, despite some reservations about this new theory, scientist have yet to disprove. One
thing is clear however, you are going to die. And it’s not going to be pretty. So, crossing the event
horizon wasn’t the best idea.

Let’s rewind and this time, maybe you trick an enemy, let's call them Darth, into taking a journey to a
black hole. What would you see as he unsuspectingly got closer and closer to his final destination?
As we’ve learnt, black holes can warp light, but they can also do some pretty strange things to time
as well. As you watched Darth fall ever closer to the black hole he would appear to be moving
increasingly slowly and his watch would tick more slowly than yours. Also, you’d never actually see
him cross over the event horizon, instead he'd just grind to a stop, in a kind of suspended animation,
right on the edge of the black hole.

Because of the extreme gravity, any light coming from Darth would be shifted to the red end of the
spectrum, making him seem red as he got closer to the black hole. Eventually he’d just get dimmer
and dimmer and fade away, and according to you, he never actually makes it across the event
horizon. But he does make it, and then he’s either turned into spaghetti or barbecued by radiation.
Thankfully Darth is never coming back, well unless Disney come off with a really uncultured plot
device. But it doesn’t matter who you are, you can't escape a black hole. Renowned physicist Kip
Thorne, who helped consult on the film interstellar, sums up black hole as “A HOLE IN SPACE WITH A
DEFINITE EDGE OVER WHICH ANYTHING CAN FALL AND NOTHING CAN ESCAPE"
But here is the thing this isn't strictly true. According to this, empty space isn't totally empty. Here
virtual particles can pop in and out of existence in extremely short time frames. These particle and
antiparticle pairs usually just annihilate each other. For example, a positron, a particle of antimatter,
will annihilate an electron. This is happening all the time, but something weird can happen when
these virtual particles pop into existence around a black hole. We already know that nothing can
escape from inside the event horizon, and that's true when these particles spawn inside a black hole.
They’re stuck there for a moment before annihilating each other as usual. However, sometimes,
outside of the hole, one half of these particles spare can pop into existence and then fall into the
event horizon, while the other half escapes off into the universe. This process is called Hawking
radiation and slowly causes the black hole to evaporate, since it losing energy. But I’m talking
seriously slowly though, for Sagittarius A star, our neighbouring supermassive black hole, it would
take 10^87 years before it evaporated away. That’s 1 Octovigintillion years, and no, that's not a
made-up number! Although we should point out that Hawking radiation has not actually been
observed yet, it’s only been predicted by the late great Stephen Hawking. And even if it is proven
true, technically, those particles are they never inside the black hole just the edge of the event
horizon, so even Hawking radiation does not break the rule that nothing can escape from a black
hole. However, it does change one thing about how we perceive black holes not totally black, since
they emit radiation. Then again the name ‘almost black holes’ does not have the same ring to it.

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