Astronomers finally figure out what it's like inside an actual, spinning black hole - and where exactly it'd kill you.
A spinning black hole actually has two types of horizons, and it's against the inner that hapless travelers would meet their end. The average person doesn’t spend a lot of time thinking about black holes, which is why a place like the Black Hole Initiative exists. Founded in 2016 at Harvard University, it is the world’s first academic center devoted solely to the study of these fantastical, enigmatic objects.
What would happen if you fell into a black hole? Where would you go and, more to the point, where would you die? They were by no means the first to delve into this issue. In 1915, Albert Einstein unveiled his general theory of relativity, encapsulated within 10 exceptionally complicated equations. They show how the universe’s distribution of matter and energy affects its geometry, or curvature, and how that curvature, in turn, is manifested as gravity.
It was not until 1963, nearly a half-century later, that the mathematician and physicist Roy Kerr came up with his own solution to Einstein’s equations, one that describes the space and gravitational field surrounding a real-life, rotating black hole — subsequently dubbed a Kerr black hole. However, when other physicists, building on Kerr’s result, tried to explore the crazy physics within these rotating maelstroms, they discovered some curious features.
That, at least, was the presumption when he and his colleagues decided to carry out the first detailed numerical simulations of Kerr black hole interiors, building on the work of others in the field. With any luck, they’d figure out exactly what goes on inside. “The biggest thing we did to make the task doable was to spend much more time thinking about solving the problem than actually solving it,” says Chesler.
After laying the groundwork, the researchers were ready to begin the actual simulation. “We start with the equations of general relativity,” Chesler explains, “specify some initial conditions, and then see how things evolve as we move forward in time.” The simulation worked out the geometry of space-time inside a Kerr black hole — about the same as determining the gravitational field, according to Einstein’s theory.
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