What happens when we get attracted by a Black Hole in the space?

Black Holes

Space-time in which we live can be conceptualised as a grid. Any object which possesses a mass distorts space-time forming around it a gravitational well. If another object is close by, then it will get attracted and spiral down the gravitational well like a marble in a bowl. The greater the mass of the object, the stronger the attraction and the quicker the attracted object must move to free itself from the gravitational pull. If the mass of the object becomes huge without the object growing in size then the gravitational well created will be so great that the speed required to escape it would be greater than the speed of light. Since nothing can move faster than the speed of light then nothing will be able to escape this attraction, even light if it gets too close will be captured. This is a black hole. At its core, a black hole holds a gravitational singularity. This is a point in space at which the curvature of space-time becomes infinite. The further we move away from this singularity the weak of the gravitational pull. Once we reach a limit known as the event horizon, the gravitational pull becomes weak enough for light passing by to escape the black hole. As such, all entities outside the horizon can hope to escape the black hole but as soon as an object moves within the horizon it is destined to fall into the black hole without ever being able to come back.

Recognition of a Black Holes

Since black holes swallow up any light that gets too close, they appear black to us and as such cannot be seen directly. Nonetheless, they can be detected indirectly. Firstly, their presence is given away by their strong gravitational influence. Since they are capable of deviating light, the black holes effectively behave like gravitational lenses which deviate the trajectory of light rays coming from far away stars, thus creating a gravitational Mirage. Since they have a strong influence from far away, black holes can also be identified by looking at the trajectories of stars close by. Finally, even though black holes do not emit any sort of radiation themselves, they do emit some indirectly. Indeed, around certain black holes attracted surrounding matter will form a disc rotating around the singularity. This disc by rotating at high speeds will warm up and emit X and gamma rays which are relatively straightforward to detect.

Sizes of Black Holes

There exist in the universe black holes of all sorts of size. The smallest ones known as stellar black holes are caused by the collapse of massive stars with the size of only a few kilometers. They, nonetheless, have a mass several times greater than our Sun. The largest black holes are found at the center of galaxies, ours included. These supermassive black holes are enormous reaching several billion kilometres in size. Finally, while black holes cannot emit radiation, complex quantum effects result in every black hole evaporating slowly emitting a certain unique type of radiation which we call Hawking's radiation. The larger a black hole the more time it would take to evaporate. As such, for normal sized black holes this evaporation is extremely slow spread out over billions of years and therefore of little importance to us. However, there could well exist microscopic black holes which might have formed following the Big Bang. For these primordial black holes, the evaporation phenomenon would be very important leading to an almost instantaneous disappearance.

Black holes are complex objects full of mystery and which continued to feed scientific imagination. They have given rise to many questions and hypotheses such as the existence of shortcuts which could enable us to travel through space-time wormholes.