Travel INSIDE a Black Hole

Hey, Vsauce. Michael here. And today we are going to go inside a black hole. It's not

going to be comfortable, but it will be pretty fun. Now, first thing's first: mathematically

speaking, anything could become a black hole, if you were to compress it into a small enough

space. That's right, you, me, this camera - everything in the unvierse has what is known

as a "Schwarzschild radius." A tiny, tiny amount of space that, were you to collapse the entire

mass of the object into, its density would be so great that its gravitational pull would

be so great that not even light could escape from it. You would have a black hole.

If you were to compress Mount Everest into something smaller than a nanometer, you would

have a black hole. And if you were to compress the entire Earth down to the size of a peanut,

you would have a black hole.

But, fortunately for us, there is no known way to compress Everest or Earth in that fashion.

But a star, many, many, many times larger than our own Sun, has a much larger Schwartzchild

radius, and when it runs out of fuel and can no longer keep itself hot enough, it collapses

to a single, infinitesimally-small point known as a "singularity."

Its density will be infinite and so its gravitational pull will be so strong that

nothing can escape, not even light.

But enough about ways black holes form, let's jump into one. First question: what would

it look like from the outside? Well, we know that gravitational fields bend space and time.

Stars behind our Sun will actually appear to be in slightly different locations from

Earth, because the Sun's gravitational field bends the light coming from those stars.

When it comes to the gravitational fields of larger objects, like entire galaxies or,

for that matter, a black hole, the effect is even nuttier. Light coming from object's

behind them is significantly distorted, producing smears and smudges.

As seen from Earth, the blue galaxy behind this red galaxy is completely distorted, like

a fun house mirror. So, rather than appearing as it really should, it looks to us like a ring -

a smudge all the way around the red galaxy.