It turns out, if you’re ever unfortunate enough to stumble across a black hole, there is a small chance you might survive the encounter – because they’re very messy eaters.
As far as astronomers can tell, most galaxies have a black hole at their centre – ours is a supermassive one called Sagittarius A*.
And as is well-publicised, they’re a force to be reckoned with, swallowing up everything in their reach and stretching it out in a process known as spaghettification.
A person falling into a black hole would undergo the same torturous process – although from the outside you would appear frozen in space and time for eternity.
Fairly bleak.
However, researchers from the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan used the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) to observe the supermassive black hole in the Circinus Galaxy, located 14 million light-years away in the direction of the constellation Circinus. This black hole is known to be actively feeding.
The team, led by Assistant Professor Takuma Izumi, have determined that only about 3% of the gas that flows towards a black hole and its massive gravity is actually eaten by it – the rest is ejected and recycled back into the host galaxy.
This means that even if you become caught in the black hole’s gravity and begin being sucked towards it, all is not lost.
‘The difference between being captured by the gravity of the black hole and falling into it is like being on a river with a waterfall,’ explains Dr Jakob van den Eijnden, from the University of Warwick.
What is a black hole?
Nasa writes: ‘Don’t let the name fool you – a black hole is anything but empty space. Rather, it is a great amount of matter packed into a very small area – think of a star ten times more massive than the Sun squeezed into a sphere approximately the diameter of New York City.
‘The result is a gravitational field so strong that nothing, not even light, can escape.
‘Most black holes form from the remnants of a large star that dies in a supernova explosion. Smaller stars become dense neutron stars, which are not massive enough to trap light.’
‘If you are on the river, you are captured and moving towards the waterfall, but if you paddle fast enough, you can escape to the riverbank. Falling into the black hole is like going over the edge of the waterfall, where there is no chance of return.’
That point of no return is known as the event horizon, the edge or ‘mouth’ of the black hole, beyond which you’re a goner.
But if you’re just in the cosmic bowl that’s feeding it, your fate isn’t yet sealed.
‘What these astronomers observed is that a large amount of gas is flowing towards the black hole, because it is captured by the black hole’s tremendously large gravitational pull,’ adds Dr Van den Eijnden.
‘However, that doesn’t mean the gas will automatically fall into the black hole itself – that only becomes inevitable when the gas does not escape before it gets incredibly close to the event horizon.
‘Before the gas reaches that point, there are different ways in which it can escape from the black hole’s pull – astronomers call this escaping material “winds” or “jets”.’
And in addition to being messy eaters, black holes are also prone to ‘burping’, throwing the remains of devoured stars back into space years after swallowing them up.
However, that won’t be much help to anyone who fell in. This isn’t a Jonah and the whale situation – you’ll be long dead. And a noodle.
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