![]() Just because black holes are bizarre doesn’t mean everything you hear about them is true. Jupiter’s closest moon, Io (pictured), is distorted so much by the gravity of Jupiter (and other moons) that it has huge volcanic eruptions. Jupiter, for instance, is so massive that it causes its moons to squeeze and stretch, leading to a heated core and volcanic activity. If you were on a planet orbiting close to a supermassive or stellar black hole, the tidal forces could be extreme-possibly leading to scenarios like the breathtaking tide scene in the 2014 film Interstellar (though that particular sci-fi rendition still involves some questionable physics).īlack holes can even tear planets or stars apart!īut, like the possibility of forward time travel, huge tidal forces is not a phenomenon unique to black holes. This is because the gravity of the sun and moon distort the ocean in different directions, depending on the time of day. On Earth, the gravitational pull of the sun and moon creates the tides of our oceans. True: black holes cause huge tidal forcesĪnother result of extreme gravity is extreme tidal forces. As we hope to make clear throughout this topic, passing the event horizon of a black hole would be a very bad idea. Using the gravity near black holes to travel into the future isn’t the same idea as entering a black hole and using it as a wormhole. ![]() You can read more in our topic on gravity. Not even light can escape once it enters the event horizon., or you’ll never be able to return and reap the rewards of your time travel! The details of gravitational time travel are pretty mind boggling. GLOSSARY event horizon the region around a black hole that can be thought of as an ultimate point of no return. (That might be a challenge, seeing as how the closest supermassive black hole, Sagittarius A*, is about 26,000 light years away.) It’s just that the effects only become noticeable if the gravity is really intense, so a supermassive black hole might be your prime ticket to the future … assuming you could get close enough. This isn’t a feature limited to black holes-it can happen wherever there’s enough gravity. You can’t go back into the past, but if you got close enough to a black hole, you could travel to the future. ![]() Want to be a time traveller? Hang around an area with extreme gravity for a while. True: you could use black holes to travel forward in time But for us to accept that latter option, those tweaked theories will need to be developed, tested, and proven-and still be able to explain simpler physics like why you don’t float away from Earth when you jump, or how we can use gravitational boosts of planets to get spacecraft to specific targets in the outer solar system. Pyle.įrom all that we’ve learnt, it’s either the case that black holes really do exist, or the laws of physics as we know them need to be tweaked. A collision of two black holes has been detected through the measurement of gravitational waves. The ripple matched the predicted signal of two colliding black holes, giving us direct evidence for their existence. By directing two lasers beams down a long tunnel and looking for abnormalities in how the light travels, scientists detected a ripple in space itself. ![]() Not satisfied with indirect evidence? Enter the gravitational wave discovery, first announced in February 2016 and with a second detection announced in June 2016. There’s nothing else we think that it could be other than a black hole. You find that there is something there that’s over four million times the mass of our sun but in a tiny area that produces absolutely no light. This includes observations of how objects move around black holes, or how light is distorted. ![]() But we can see them indirectly, based on how they influence the matter around them. We cannot directly see black holes with any light we know how to detect. So to prove black holes exist, we need to look at astronomical observations. Although these laws of physics have held up against experimental testing, that’s still not a guarantee that these extreme scenarios really happen in nature. The idea of black holes has been around for hundreds of years, ever since scientists took the known laws of physics and determined what would happen at their most extreme. Let’s start with some truths-things we are almost certain to be correct based on our current knowledge. ![]()
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