Slashdot Mirror
How an Astronaut Falling Into a Black Hole Would Die Part 2
First time accepted submitter ydrozd writes "Until recently, most physicists believed that an observer falling into a black hole would experience nothing unusual when crossing its event horizon. As has been previously mentioned on Slashdot, there is a strong argument, initially based on observing an entangled pair at the event horizon, that suggests that the unfortunate observer would instead be burned up by a high energy quanta (a.k.a "firewall") just before crossing the black hole's event horizon. A new paper significantly improves the argument by removing reliance on quantum entanglement. The existence of black hole "firewalls" is a rare breakthrough in theoretical physics."
Technically if you cross the event horizon and if there is no firewall, then your family will die long before you do. So, should they set up funeral for millions of years in the future. And if you cross the event horizon, should you mourn them immediately?
Why hasn't science answered these questions?
The only new information cited is behind a $25 pay wall. Kill it with fire.
From the arxiv: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1307.4706.pdf
From a surfeit of "would"s, apparently.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I wonder how you setup a static nat on a Black Hole...
hmmm
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
It's not the fall that kills you, it's the sudden ...oh wait, it IS the fall that kills you.
http://arxiv.org/abs/1307.4706
How did the mods miss this? Hiding public research behind a paywall is (morally) a crime.
he might be frozen, burned, alive and dead all at same time.
I'm thinking more like crushed like a marshmallow in an infinite pressure pressure-cooker.
Or pummeled to death by other matter falling into the black hole.
Or die from the radiation.
Or die from being absorbed into a star falling into said black hole.
Or from the smell of shitting their pants in the space suit once they realize they're falling into a black hole.
Or just from lack of oxygen, dehydration, or starvation, as it's a pretty long trip from here to the nearest black hole. 1600 light years is a long trip, even at the speed of light.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
The funny thing is . . . if someone announced a space program to toss an astronaut down a black hole . . . there would be plenty of volunteers for the mission.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
You'd die from the g force before that. You would die from old age since the closest black hole is light years away. And, if you were traveling through space near the speed of light, then you would observer yourself suffocating. Then you would stop observing.
The gravitational force on physical objects would squeeze his body to a spaghetti far before the event horizon.
Hopefully quickly.
If the astronaut would be very small he might notice nothing.
Or if the black hole was very big. Which most of the ones we know about are.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Black hole firewalls don't really exist.
Here's a summary:
http://arxiv.org/abs/1310.6334
and the long paper:
http://arxiv.org/abs/1310.6335
Resolving the issue.
In short, the black hole paradox doesn't exist and can be explained.
Motl has a really nice summary as well:
http://motls.blogspot.com/2013/10/raju-papadodimas-isolate-reasons-why.html
A black hole would eventually stretch a person into spagetti, but not necessarily near the event horizon. For a small black hole the effect might be well outside the event horizon while for a supermassive black hole the effect would be well inside of it.
This is because the event horizon of a super-massive black hole is so large that while the gravitational pull there is enormous, the variation in the graviational forces in a human-sized volume is quite small. It's the variation in the forces that stretches you.
Likewise, while the total gravitation pull well outside the event horizon of a small black hole is much less than the total gravitational pull near the event horizon of a super-massive one, the variation is much higher.
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I'm sort of lost here. Granted I know very little about this subject, but what I do know is black holes are far away. And entangled pairs are really fucking small. So how the hell can we see entangled pairs at the event horizon of a black hole? Seems to me if we can see stuff that small, that far away, finding planets similar to ours would be easy, since they are very very very much bigger.
Be seeing you...
I'm thinking more like crushed like a marshmallow in an infinite pressure pressure-cooker.
Or pummeled to death by other matter falling into the black hole.
Or die from the radiation.
Or die from being absorbed into a star falling into said black hole.
Or from the smell of shitting their pants in the space suit once they realize they're falling into a black hole.
Or just from lack of oxygen, dehydration, or starvation, as it's a pretty long trip from here to the nearest black hole. 1600 light years is a long trip, even at the speed of light.
Yes to the above.
Spaghettification is one component of the end game. The gravity delta from head to
toe would tear a human into a true mess.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaghettification
In addition any external mass like the space ship or any maneuvering jet
reaction mass would accelerate to the point of generating astoundingly short
wavelength ionizing radiation and the proteins of life would be totally denatured.
I would discount the smell of poo in the pants as being fatal, stuff happens
as we all know but not fatal except for those that aspirate their vomit and
die of pneumonia. Aspiration pneumonia is a big risk even if a drowning
victim "recovers" a trip to a hospital is a good thing to do.
Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't. Mark Twain.
So the flying spaghetti monster could, one day, be for real...
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
How can "the observer" be burnt, when the observer can be any object at any particular time and space? One can observe from any angle or reflection hence be anywhere. You don't know if someone really dies or lives. if the black hole is as misunderstood as how it is so far, we don't know enough to know the answer to this, how come a conclusion can be reached from so little information? if he is dead, the most probably he wouldn't know. Radiation will not burnt it, if light itself can not escape a black hole, how can information reaching the brain give any notion of pain if it probably got discarded in some random [or not so random] motion? Plus how can the radiation escape to burn, if the event horizon is absorbing anything, it makes sense that it will suck out even information, so how can your brain interpret you are burning? In fact, it can't even see it is burning, because to see, you need to have reflection, this will defeat the theory that a blackhole absorbs even light.
You beat me to it, the tidal effects would tear you apart. You can shield radiation, you can't shield gravity.
Free Martian Whores!
But would he chuck wood?
We can cloak light. We can cloak magnetism. Both recent developments, both recently far fetched science-fiction. As a thought experiement at least, what if we could cloak an object - perhaps even one containing a human - from gravity and then send that object on a trajectory into a black hole. This assumes that the high levels of radiation and firewall have also been overcome.
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
The nearest black hole is 1600 light-years away
That's the nearest one that we can see. However we only detect them by seeing emissions from the matter which falls into them. There could easily be one nearer that is nowhere near any matter. The only way we would then be able to detect it is by its gravitational influence on the solar system.
However, regardless of this, if you actually made it to a Black Hole the tidal forces would rip you apart well before you close enough to worry about massive time dilation effects. The closer you get to the black hole the stronger the field which means that, assuming you went in head first, the gravitational pull on your head would be a lot greater than the pull on your feet...you can imagine what the result will be when this force difference becomes large enough.
Do ACs blend?
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
I'm thinking any which way it's a bad place to end up.
When aliens finally visit Earth and drop off a huge fleet of spare intergalactic spaceships, I'll make sure to ask for maps that avoid unsurvivable gravity wells. :)
I think we'll be ok for quite a while.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
Roche limit describes the maximum characteristic length of a gravitationally bound body in orbit of another object based on gravitational gradient. Basically, no larger objects (of similar density) are expected to form at any particular orbit level. It's not a perfect fit for something that is chemically bound, but you can still derive a form of it using other physical constants of the right units. Yield strength, for instance.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
you are just posting competing hypothesis.
Sorry guys, it's not romantic at all,
the astronaut would die or be dead anyway, if the black hole is
a.) in absolute Vacuum, nerve destruction by hard gamma radiation+particle radiation, even his spacesuit would not protect him
Why ? -> gamma radiation black body radiation, continuum source -> temperature -> high temperature -> short wave lengths -> hard gamma radiation
Where comes the radiation from, his own atoms off course !
Absolute Vacuum + Astronaut = not a vacuum anymore.
b.) in interstellar space, he would be even dead before hand, because if there are particlesm as there are within interstellar space, these would be
converted to gamma or X-ray radiation
In this case the astronaut should try to adjust his flightpath colinear to the axis of rotation because then the addtional synchrotron radiation from the acretion disc would not add up to his dosage
c.) .. this is rediculous
if he would dive in feet forward he can
if there is a tiny black hole, there are particles, because black holes suck them up, even in the outer space beyond our solar system,
there is no absolute vacuum (mark absolute in addition to vacuum is a double of nothing, vacuum is absolute, interstellar space has no vacuum!)
because you would at least count one atom/molecule within a cubicmeter, and space has many cubic meters !!
Short form of E=mc is if you smash a particle it will emit a certain energy equivalent to it's mass, and energy equals photons as c is constant you need to charge up the lambda, to extrem short periods this would equal tooo .. yes hard gamma radiation !
Planck !!
This is why the romulans should have won the war, because they use a singularity energy source ... and well this is nothing else than a black hole,
you feed it matter it will give off energy, EXTREMLY effcient.
Need proof ? .. and well this is our galactic center we all circle around, and it's a black hole.
Lock at the sky, target cygnus X1 - a X-ray source
If you would beam an astronaut within a 1km radius .. he would be dead on arrival, as a human being that would be subjected to a gamma radiation source .. then so be it.
like these used to sterilize special items, ok if you count after 3 seconds as not DOA
And how would Slashdot would look if would editors would edit?
Assuming you could get to a black hole before dying of old age.....
Gamma Radiation would kill you long before a quantum firewall or tidal forces.
"He took a duck in the face at 250 knots." -- William Gibson, Pattern Recognition
Please remember that there is basically no experimental evidence for any of this speculation. No. Experimental. Evidence. There is barely evidence for general relativity type black holes*, no evidence at all for Hawking radiation, and thus of course no evidence for the theoretical infrastructure built on top of Hawking radiation.
And, plenty of (theoretical) papers have looked at this and come to alternate conclusions.
I suspect that when we actually do start experimenting with black hole event horizons directly we will find that some crucial fact was missed which invalidates all of this theoretical work, but I could just be in a grumpy mood.
* There is plenty of evidence that there are very dense collections of matter in the centers of galaxies and other locations in the universe, dense enough that at least some of them have to be black holes in general relativity, but that is not proof that the black holes predicted by General Relativity actually do exist, even though it is very reasonable and convenient to label these objects "black holes" for most purposes, . (The issue is that other theories of gravity have different types of black holes, or none at all, and G.R. cannot be regarded as experimentally proven in this regime.) Only recently has there been any direct evidence for an event horizon, one of the key predictions for a general relativistic type black hole, and we are still waiting on the detection of gravitational radiation from a newly formed black hole, which is what it will take for this issue to really be nailed down.
I've always sided against Hawking on this...Susskind was right
I think you actually agree with me, b/c this is the same as the EH 'obliterating' it...
I never said it was "lost" i said it was "obliterated"
the **way** the energy is dispersed across the EH preserves the 2nd Law...the conflict over whether information is 'lost' or 'not lost' is a fault of Hawking-style information theory. Hawking (as is his custom) was making a distinction w/o a difference.
something can be obliterated without the information being 'lost'....we watch it obliterated into 'nothing' (aka the Evebt Horizon)...yes, you could call the state of the matter immediately before it becomes 'obliterated' as a 'hologram'...but it doesn't disprove what I'm saying at all
in this sense, a 'black hole' truly is 'nothing'...that's why if TFA is right, black holes are essentially bubbles of 'nothing' in the quantum foam of the universe
Thank you Dave Raggett
sorry...one last thing...
when matter hits the Event Horizon, it is obliterated into 'nothing' and scattered across the EH...
one thing I forgot to mention is that, again, the 2nd Law is not violated in my view b/c the **black hole gets bigger** as it obliterates matter
Thank you Dave Raggett
If someone falls into a black hole, is their soul stuck there for the 62 zillion years it takes the black hole to evaporate?
If you pushed someone into a black hole, could you beat the murder rap by pointing out that he still hadn't finished falling in, from the jury's reference frame?
If you modified Shrõdinger's experiment so that the decay of an atom dropped the cat into a black hole rather than gassing it, then put a cat in the box to create a superposition of "the cat is in the black hole" and "the cat is not in the black hole", is it possible for the superposition to collapse to "the cat is not in the black hole"?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
So the flying spaghetti monster could, one day, be for real...
It was created when a walking lasagne monster got too close to a black hole.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
You don't have to proofread the headline before posting?
And yes, that headline is a classic "copy/paste/rewrite" mistake.
... than to be an adventurer who is the first to enter a black hole.
*Note: Yes, horrible Skyrim joke reference that is completely out of date... but someone had to say it... (grin)
There are so many things wrong with this article. First you'd be torn apart by tidal forces. Long before you got anywhere near it. If you somehow survived that, then time would slow as you approached. The wavelength of light would stretch due to time dilation, and the light hitting you from stars in the sky would shorten, so much so that you'd be roasted by high energy radiation. Lastly, it would take a very very very long time to actually reach the event horizon. As time slowed the victim would likely see the end of the universe behind him.
I always assumed the astronaut would be ripped apart by tidal forces long before reaching the event horizon.
Opus: the Swiss army knife of audio codec
I wasn't aware that it was posted on Facebook. Or did you mean Twitter?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
The crappy grammar would kill him before he even would got there.
You beat me to it, the tidal effects would tear you apart. You can shield radiation, you can't shield gravity.
Yet.
Star Trek, there maybe hope.
Assuming you could get to a black hole before dying of old age.....
That was my point - there might be one close enough that you might imagine getting to it within your lifetime because we can't see it. Such a BH would not emit gamma radiation because there is no matter falling into it which is where the gamma emission comes from. Indeed if it was emitting gamma radiation we would see it because of that.
Gamma Radiation would kill you long before a quantum firewall or tidal forces.
The only radiation a BH in the absence of matter emits is Hawking radiation and, while I'm not an astrophysicist and don't have the precise numbers to hand, I believe that is incredibly little and almost certainly enough that it would be easy to shield against although I don't think you would even need to.
The astronauts freeze dried ice-cream would come through intact. Didn't you ever wonder why the stuff in the museum seems like it's been around for trillions of years?
The existence of black hole "firewalls"...
This is the firewall I have been wanting for my home LAN.
But I'm guessing it may be tricky to implement without sucking everything out of my network, including me...
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
Launch a suitably instrumented satellite into orbit around earth. Crank up the LHC, creating a small black hole. This will rapidly consume the earth. Since the mass of this black hole would be the same as that of the earth, the satellite's orbit would not be affected. The satellite could then make numerous measurements of phenomena occurring at the event horizon.
OK, repeatability would be a problem.
Have gnu, will travel.
Unless the argument is that a black hole can sustain a a dense field of sub-atomic particles in high speed orbit near the event horizon in a toroidal form collapsing at the poles. So the answer to what happens to an astronaut who falls into a black hole, well, that depends upon whether it is near the black holes equator or it's poles.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
There's a write up for the Firewall theory at http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2013/06/05/firewalls-burning-brightly/
And as you guys are commenting about what the family should do ... I do not think that guy would last that long because, according to the firewall theory, once he hit the event horizon the entanglement would occur
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
My understanding/way I imagine it is that; as you move towards the blackhole, the particles that make up the astronaut cause the event horizon to come out to meet them, and this curves the event horizon and this causes a local burst of Hawking-type radiation that rips apart the astronaut, and this radiation spreads out from the impact point in a wave; that in turn creates more perturbations of the horizon and so on. You end up with a very thin ring of fire all around the black hole. And this never goes away; indeed it forms the moment the black hole does, and so there's actually nothing inside the blackhole, just flat spacetime. In a sense I suppose the collapse never completely happens you end up with just a shell of matter.
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"I'm going to assume some things that are pretty well accepted by the physics community. Of course, one can always find people with opposing viewpoints.
I attended a talk on the firewall issue by Leonard Susskind last week, and he started with some interesting comments on the whole "what do theoretical physicists do?" question.
He gave four cases:
The conflict with firewalls is that quantum entanglement (which has held up very well so far) shouldn't cause the equivalence principal to be violated (this, too, has done very well experimentally). The equivalence principal states that an accelerated observer, absent other information, can't tell if their in a rocket or standing on a surface in a gravitational field. Implied by this is the "no drama" notion that says that nothing interesting should happen when one falls through an event horizon, which itself is a smooth bit of space-time. (I'm assuming here, for the sake of a macroscopic observer, that it's a big enough black hole that tides don't come into play until well towards the central singularity and that the surroundings aren't full of super heated, radiating matter.) The firewall hypothesis arises as a possible solution to what happens (very) late in the evolution of a black hole when most of the matter still inside the horizon is entangled with matter that's been emitted as Hawking radiation. The equivalence principal says that a firewall, being very dramatic, shouldn't happen. This firewall isn't the same as the very, very late stage of a black hole when the Hawking radiation is so intense that nothing is likely to get past and make its way into the hole. Maldacena and Susskind seek to resolve this and have come up with the notion that EPR bridges (entanglement) and wormholes (general relativity) are the same thing. (Now before everyone gets going about wormholes, these aren't expected to be anything more than a sort of identity mapping between entangled particles.) I don't claim to follow everything about how the initial entanglement described in the paper actually comes about, but the overall argument has a feeling of making sense, and a room full of gray haired physicists didn't tear it down. Susskind also pointed out that if black hole horizons become messy, so do other kinds of horizon such as cosmological ones, adding further inelegant complications for the theorists.
The
Credo sim. - I think I am.
Quanta is plural. You cannot have "a quanta" any more than you can have "a mice".
In fact the word is essentially meaningless within the OP, but hey, it sounds all sciencey and shit, so let's whack it in anyway.
I'm still down with Kenja's idea with the monkeys.
"Locate a black hole and start shooting monkeys at it! "Science can not progress without heaps [of monkeys]"
Thanks Kenja, for your input.
An unfortunate astronaut falling into a black hole would probably die due to different gravitational pulls acting on his body. The parts of his body closer to the singularity would get ripped off (or more likely, the spacesuit would rupture) as he approached the singularity.
"Evil will always triumph over good, because good is dumb." - Dark Helmet (Spaceballs)
What's wrong with the headline?
Unity? Screw that: XFCE. Slashdot Beta? Screw that: SoylentNews. Australis? Screw that: Pale Moon. UX developers DIAF
... would it be the same for a cosmonaut as an astronaut?
General Relativity states that nothing can cross a black hole's event horizon. How can anything in the article be believe when it has such an obvious error?
Don't stop where the ink does.
Someone falling into a black hole would die as they approached the event horizon by being ripped apart by tidal forces (for those of you who skipped science, those are the forces that created Saturn's rings).
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