Flying Into a Black Hole

I read an unusual question stated in an issue of Popular Science recently. It asked what would happen if a person were to swallow a spoonful of white dwarf star. The one who answered the question went into gory detail over the many ways it would be the demise of any unfortunate star eaters.

Because I was already familiar with the composition, extreme density, high temperature, etc. of a white dwarf, I already knew what would happen. That did not stop me from being entertained by the answer.

So have decided to answer a few questions I see floating around the World Wide Web in similar fashion. I am doing this mostly for my own entertainment, but maybe someone else would find it funny as well.

Question #1

What would happen if the space shuttle were to fly into a black hole?

Answer:

If a person were to fly into a black hole they would find themselves in an unusual situation. The oddest part of it is that there are no detected black holes within range of our space shuttles.

Let’s assume that is not an issue. Our space shuttle tries to point in the direction of the black hole, but there is a problem. Our ill-fated astronauts cannot see it. A black hole is black. What color is space? Black! So how are they supposed to see it?

However there may be a way around that issue. Assuming that the black hole is in the process of swallowing something, be it a planet, star, or whatever, the debris form a disk shape around the black hole called an accretion disk. Provided there is some source of light close enough to illuminate the disk letting you can actually see it, the center of the disk will be your black hole.

So you are flying your shuttle into the black hole. But your shuttle is just too darn slow.

Let’s find a starting point for our ill-fated astronauts. Although the gradational pull of anything never actually disappears entirely, let’s assume that you began to notice the effects of this black hole when you were one light year away. That is 10,000,000,000,000 kilometers away! It is also roughly the distance from our sun to the Oort Cloud. Traveling at 27,000 Km per hour it would take the Space Shuttle 40,963 years to reach the black hole. To put that into prospective, if the shuttle set for the black hole from the Oort Cloud the day the Great Pyramid was finished, it would still have over 36,300 years to go as of today.

So let’s say you still somehow managed to reach the black hole and you managed to avoid being pulverized by the space debris of the accretion disk, you would find something even more horrifying.

Edit: Your approach to the black hole would also bring you into lethal waves of radiation emitting from the black hole.Nothing could survive the radiation.  

They call it spaghettification! The specifics of spaghettification are rather odd; just understand that the closer you are to the black hole the stronger the force of gravity is. If you are close enough the force of gravity will be significantly greater on the nose of your shuttle than it is at the tail. The shuttle is stretched like spaghetti!!! However it is likely the shuttle will be ripped to pieces instead, along with everyone inside of it.

Unfortunately for our would-be astronauts, this is the end of their journeys. They are nothing but dead matter, ripped apart at the atomic level inside of the black hole. Their atoms in their bodies would probably fuse together in nuclear fusion and produce incredible nuclear energy, but no one would ever know it. The gravity of the black hole is so intense the light your nuclear fussing body produces will never escape the black hole’s relentless pull.

That was fun.

Edit: A reader left a comment referring me to read an article named Predictable Barriers Precluding Any Consideration of Transversable Black Holes Through Outer Space. This article has been used to denounce the possibility of actually entering a black hole alive. Note that the question of what would happen if one flew into a black hole is a purely hypothetical question.Just because it is logistically impossible does not mean that we cannot speculate what would happen if it were to occur. Just the same, we theorize what would happen to objects that approach or reach the speed of light, even though it is impossible to actually do so.

I do enjoy constructive criticism, so please call me out if you think I am wrong.