Virtual Plunge into a Black Hole

image from wikimedia.org

From a CNN.com article titled “Astronomers take virtual plunge into black hole“

To be sucked in by a black hole, you need to reach its event horizon, the one-way boundary beyond which nothing can escape. The more massive a black hole, the bigger this point of no return around it, said Jeff McClintock, a senior astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

The most common black holes, which weigh on average 10 times as much as the sun, have boundaries 40 miles across. But most galaxies also have supermassive black holes at their centers, which weigh millions of suns and would have boundaries that stretch millions of miles. Blog: What is a white hole?

Approaching the horizon, you would notice nothing special, but someone observing you from the outside would see you freeze in place and become a lot dimmer because light that you emit at the boundary takes a long time to get out, Hamilton said.

Many people think you would be engulfed in darkness when you fall in, but that is a common misconception, Hamilton points out. The view of the outside universe would become distorted, but would not disappear.

Once you pass the horizon — or go over Niagara Falls, in the waterfall analogy — you would be falling faster than the speed of light toward the black hole’s center — called a singularity — and feeling the effects, Hamilton said.

“The gravity at your feet is stronger than the gravity at your head, as long as you fall in feet first. … You feel this difference in gravity between your feet and your head as a tidal force, which pulls you apart vertically in a process called ’spaghettification,’ ” Hamilton writes on his Web site.

“At the same time as you are pulled apart vertically, you are crushed in the horizontal direction, like a rubber band being pulled. So if you would like to be taller and thinner, then one way to achieve that is to fall into a black hole.”

If black holes are so powerful and majestic, then how much more is the God who created them.  The universe declares the glory of God!