What Would a Journey to the Black Hole Be Like??

Hey guys how you doing me doing great just backing where am I going huh glad
you asked I’m setting off on a journey toward the nearest black hole yep risky and brave that’s me
but don’t worry I’ll keep you in the know by live-streaming my entire adventure so make yourself comfortable and come travel through space with me okay so let me introduce my spaceship the name of this super fast beauty is the invincible and people won’t create anything of the kind for the next several decades the thing is that space distances are seriously long that’s why traveling there would take way more time than you’d like to spend on the road for example Voyager 1 a space probe launched in 1977 was traveling out of the solar system at the speed of 40,000 miles per hour if my spacecraft moved at the same speed it would take me a whole 77 thousand years to get to the nearest
star I mean really it would also take me more than a billion years to cross the Milky Way galaxy but luckily the invincible is much faster than that also I almost forgot to introduce my companion sorry Liam you see Liam is a robot with AI you know artificial intelligence that’s why I have high hopes for him I’ll have someone to talk to during the flight and he can help me if things get really tough.

Now let the journey begin here we go 3 2 1 blast-off Wow the earth is growing smaller and smaller by the second it seems like no time has passed but our spacecraft is already 200 miles above the surface of our planet since it’s daytime I can clearly see the great lakes shining in the Sun and oh boy I’ve just spotted something moving to the left of my ship could it be yes it’s the International Space Station did you know that the station is the most expensive single object in the world no wonder with a price tag of 100 billion dollars this money would buy you 250 Boeing 747s or two louvre with all the paintings and artwork inside for my spacecraft the ISS looks pretty big but I shouldn’t be
surprised since the length of the station is over 350 feet which is more than the length of a football field but I don’t have time to linger a black hole is calling for me now I’m about 1,300 miles over the surface of the planet and I start to spot satellites here and there I’ve read that among satellites there are low and high fliers and while the lowest flying ones move approximately 1250 miles away from Earth which is the length of four and a half Grand Canyon’s the highest reached 22,000 miles into space which almost equals the Earth’s circumference measuring about 25,000 miles by the way
few people know that satellites travel at a blinding speed from 7,000 to 18,000 miles per hour also the higher a satellite is the slower it moves relatively speaking for example the weather tracking goes system of satellites orbits the earth once a day at a distance of 22,000 miles above your head and reaches a maximum speed of 7,000 miles per hour well the satellites are being left behind and my spacecraft is already taken Liam and me toward the moon about 240,000 miles away from Earth that’s the same distance you would go if you went around our planet 10 times in a row from here Earth looks like a small bright ball hanging in the middle of nowhere and you know what else from my spacecraft I can clearly see that the moon isn’t a perfect sphere it’s shaped more like yeah like an egg Wow anyway bye-bye moon we’re headed somewhere even further hmm I see Mars Jupiter Saturn and Neptune passing by in all their glory and look there’s Pluto who used to be a planet but was later demoted from here Earth looks like a small star that’s getting fainter and fainter as I’m moving further away but wait what’s that some object is approaching me at a high speed could it be Tesla whoa that was close the thing just avoided a collision at the last moment and everything happened too fast to see it clearly but I’m pretty sure what I just saw was a Tesla right now I’m already really really far from Earth like 100 astronomical units away the thing is that space distances are so vast you can’t even calculate them in miles that’s why scientists use the term astronomic unit which equals 93 million miles the distance from the Sun to earth that means right now I’m nine point three billion miles away from our planet but whoa what’s happening why is my spaceship shaking and rocking so much I say we’re entering the termination shock the place where solar winds coming from the Sun travel at a speed of 250 miles per second and collide with the material that makes up the galaxy’s background ah there we made it through unscathed but there’s another trial ahead the Oort cloud that means two things first we’re on the outskirts of the solar system and second we’ll have to get through a cloud of icy objects orbiting the Sun at a distance of 100,000 astronomic units in other words it’s 1.87 light-years away from our star

Who it must be my lucky day since we got through the Oort cloud with just a couple of scratches on the spacecraft skin and voila we’re heading out of the solar system just one tenth of a light year later by the way if you were trying toreach this point by car the trip would take you more than 19 million years and even if you piloted one of the fastest spacecraft that exists nowadays NASA’s new Horizons you would still need 37,000 years to complete the journey so bring a big lunch alright we’ve left the borders of the solar system and now I’m sitting in my spaceship cabin watching comets and asteroids pass by time to think about my destination in the center of pretty much every galaxy there’s a supermassive black hole for example one is sitting right at the heart of our Milky Way galaxy about 27,000 light years away from Earth but even my ship wouldn’t be able to get that far before my 100th birthday that’s why my destination is the stellar black hole nearest to Earth and much smaller in size but no less mysterious its v6 1/6 monocerotis also known as v6 1/6 Mon located 3,000 light-years away and weighing the same is about nine to thirteen of our Suns a black hole is an eerie place where those laws of physics we studied at school stopped working if a massive star runs out of its star fuel
it becomes super dense and buckles under its own weight collapsing inward and bringing space-time along as a result the gravitational field of this new thing gets so strong that nothing can escape it not even light right now we’re approaching the black hole and very soon
I’ll send Liam to explore it from the inside I won’t go further than the horizon also known as the point of no return and you can probably guess why right once an object crosses this invisible line it can’t turn back even if it changed its mind anyway Liam says he’s ready to start his journey there he goes bravely plunging toward the black hole while I’m recording everything that’s happening to him he’s accelerating it looks like he’s contorting and stretching as if I’m looking through a huge magnifying glass interestingly the closer to the horizon he is the more slowly he seems to move he’s trying to send me encoded light messages like we agreed to in advance but the light wave stretched to redder and lower frequencies I’m okay I’m okay what’s happening Liam just froze as if a gigantic finger has pressed a pause button and now some force is stretching him thinner and thinner ah I’ve read
about this phenomenon it’s the infamous spaghettification which happens in a super strong non-homogeneous gravitational field the black hole’s gravity force is stronger at his feet than at his head that’s why he’s getting stretched out like a piece of spaghetti also the sensors inform me that Liam is
getting hotter and hotter and the nothing he just disappeared and I can’t see him anymore but since I did my research before the trip I know that Liam is in the state of freefall now and feels no more stretching scalding radiation or gravity unfortunately the connection is lost and he can’t tell me anything about the inside of the black hole hmm this is a moment I didn’t think through well enough anyway I hope you’re okay out there my friend and I think I’ll head home to get ready for my next space trip what about you do you think I should go all the way and explore this black hole myself next time well let me know down in the comments if you learned something new today then give this Article a like and share with a friend .

Originally published at https://interestingfactdaily.blogspot.com on May 2, 2020.