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See the amazing view from a planet being consumed by a supermassive black hole, and why the universe would appear distorted in both time and space.

Black holes distort the space-time fabric.

Take a Ride into a Supermassive Black Hole

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See the amazing view from a planet being consumed by a supermassive black hole, and why the universe would appear distorted in both time and space.

Black holes distort the space-time fabric.

Space & Flight

Take a Ride into a Supermassive Black Hole Published: December 3, 2021 GRANT TREMBLAY: So, imagine you’re some alien civilization, looking up at your lovely home star, S2, in the sky. And one day, the thing starts wandering closer and closer to what we call the “tidal disruption radius” of Sagittarius A*, this four-million-solar-mass black hole.IMOGEN WHITTAM: If you fell into a black hole, you’d pass the event horizon and actually, bizarrely, you’d see nothing. There’s no physical barrier. There’s no big line in space saying, “point of no return.” You would just drift, very casually, gently across the event horizon.NARRATOR: If we could stand on such a planet and look outwards, we’d see something spectacular.HAKEEM OLUSEYI: You’d see a distorted universe. And, in fact, you see it distorted in both time and space.IMOGEN WHITTAM: You’d see it playing out at an amazingly fast speed. The rest of time would play out unbelievably fast in front of your eyes.NARRATOR: But eventually, tidal and gravitational forces become too strong, stretching space and everything in it.IMOGEN WHITTAM: Your feet would be pulled more strongly by gravity than your head, so you’d be stretched out into a giant string. And eventually, you’d be one long string, one atom thick. We call this “spaghettification.”NARRATOR: Boulders become rocks, rocks become sand, whose very atoms are then pulled apart. Gravity and the quantum world collide. Ahead: the heart of the black hole, the singularity, where all journeys in terminate.HAKEEM OLUSEYI: Our idea of a singularity is that everything is compressed beyond what it can be, until it’s nothing but yet still exists. That is…wow.

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Take a Ride into a Supermassive Black Hole

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NOVA Universe Revealed: Big Bang

NOVA Universe Revealed: Black Holes

Sagittarius A: The Void at the Center of our Galaxy