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How to survive in a black hole

Peggy

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If you fall in there's no way to get out, but you might stretch your survival time a bit.

http://www.nature.com/news/2007/070514/full/070514-21.html
A common idea in physics is that you shouldn't try to blast your way out of there. Black holes, it's said, are like the popular view of quicksand: the harder you struggle, the worse things become.

But Geraint Lewis and Juliana Kwan of the University of Sydney in Australia say this is a myth. Their analysis of the problem, soon to be published in the Proceedings of the Astronomical Society of Australia1, shows that in general your best bet is indeed to turn on the rocket's engine. You'll never escape, but you'll live a little longer.
 

blacbird

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In terms of pure factual practicality, you'd be long gone well before you got anywhere near the event horizon of a black hole. The accretion disks of black holes generate godawful amounts of x-rays, far beyond what any remotely possible technology could shield.

caw
 

benbradley

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In terms of pure factual practicality, you'd be long gone well before you got anywhere near the event horizon of a black hole. The accretion disks of black holes generate godawful amounts of x-rays, far beyond what any remotely possible technology could shield.

caw
This is certainly true for the common black hole of a few solar masses, especially with a companion that provides lots of infalling matter. Is this also true for the superlarge Galactic-core black holes? The gravitational gradient isn't nearly so great (so much so that people and "reasonable" spaceships could survive being near and going through the event horizon), and it seems bits of matter near each other would be orbiting the black hole at nearly the same speeds, due to the much larger scale of things. Of course anything that falls in at a different angle would be another story. The high density of stars in the Galactic core could be a problem too.
 

dclary

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Don't you need a little robot with Roddy McDowell's voice, too?
 

MargueriteMing

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This is certainly true for the common black hole of a few solar masses, especially with a companion that provides lots of infalling matter. Is this also true for the superlarge Galactic-core black holes? The gravitational gradient isn't nearly so great (so much so that people and "reasonable" spaceships could survive being near and going through the event horizon), and it seems bits of matter near each other would be orbiting the black hole at nearly the same speeds, due to the much larger scale of things. Of course anything that falls in at a different angle would be another story. The high density of stars in the Galactic core could be a problem too.

As you get closer to a large body the gravitational force gets stronger. The event horizon by definition is the place where you must exceed the speed of light to get out again. Since in theory this can't be done, you can't get out, no way, no how.
 

Bartholomew

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I'd be interested to know if the event horizon of a Black Hole forms a more or less perfect sphere, or whether or not you can get closer to the anomaly by approaching it from a certain direction.

(Assuming all the other problems could be dealt with.)
 

benbradley

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As you get closer to a large body the gravitational force gets stronger. The event horizon by definition is the place where you must exceed the speed of light to get out again. Since in theory this can't be done, you can't get out, no way, no how.

The question isn't how to get out, it's how to survive in.:wag:
 

benbradley

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I'd be interested to know if the event horizon of a Black Hole forms a more or less perfect sphere, or whether or not you can get closer to the anomaly by approaching it from a certain direction.

(Assuming all the other problems could be dealt with.)

If the black hole is rotating, the event horizon won't be a sphere.
 

oscuridad

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as I recall the rotating ones are the really interesting ones, I can;t exactly remember why, though. Anyone remember?