Time Travel- Black Holes

By Julie Choi '18

Have you ever wished to go back a day after realizing you have had a huge piece of broccoli stuck in your teeth all day? I certainly have. I wish I could either go back to when I was 3 so that I would not have to worry about my grades. But did you know this? Black holes might be able to help you with that—time travel.

Black holes are like time machines. If you get really really, I mean REALLY close to the “boundary of a black hole at which nothing can escape”, aka the event horizon, every minute you spend there, a thousand years would have already passed on Earth. But be careful! Once you fall into the black hole, you will basically be stretched until you rip apart… I think this might hurt a bit. This “spaghettification” will happen because as you fall down the black hole, the gravity will grow stronger. So if you fall head first, the pull on your head will be so much greater than the pull on your feet that you will be stretched until you reach singularity.

But do not worry my friends, black holes don’t go around the space devouring stars and planets. There is not a big enough star to go through supernova and become a black hole anywhere near our solar system. But what if, out of billions of billions of chance, the sun turns into a black hole? Again, do not worry. Even if a black hole that is the same mass as the sun were to replace the sun, all 9 planets in our solar system would still be orbiting the black hole, although we would all be dead from solar winter.

If you get a chance, ask anyone, perhaps astronauts, if they have seen a black hole. If they say yes, honor code them, because they is lying! No one has ever seen a black hole, nor ever will because a black hole is just a blank spot in space. Wait, but how do we know that black holes exist? The presence of the hole is analyzed by the behavior of its surroundings. Imagine you are walking your dog and suddenly see every treetop bending in one direction. Yep, you better run away because you are about to become a spaghetto— a single strand of spaghetti.

Remember though, everything we know about the black hole is just a theory. Some theories, including Joseph Polchinski’s, a award-winning string theorist in Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics, suggests that the event horizon will act like a wall of fire, burning everything to death. Contradictorily, according to Einstein's theory, a person would simply float past the event horizon with "no drama." — that person basically wouldn’t even realize that he or she has drifted into the black hole at all. Black holes seem yet to be a tangible subject. But there is no doubt that this subject will soon be something very factual.

Contributor, Nola Taylor Redd Space.com. "Black Holes: Facts." Space.com. N.p., 9 Apr. 2015. Web. 19 Feb. 2017.

Dunbar, Brian. "What Is a Black Hole?" NASA. NASA, 21 May 2015. Web. 19 Feb. 2017.

Society, National Geographic. "Black Holes, Black Holes Information, Facts, News, Photos." National Geographic. N.p., n.d. Web. 19 Feb. 2017.