Name: Take a Ride into a Supermassive Black Hole
Uploaded: undefined
Duration: undefined

NOVA

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

The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation

Carlisle Companies

NOVA Science Trust Logo

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.

United States

Northern Mariana Islands

Puerto Rico

American Samoa

Guam

U.S. Virgin Islands

U.S. Minor Outlying Islands

US & Territories

Colossal explosions shake a remote corner of the Siberian tundra, leaving behind massive craters. In Alaska, a huge lake erupts with bubbles of inflammable gas. Scientists are discovering that these mystifying phenomena add up to a ticking time bomb, as long-frozen permafrost melts and releases vast amounts of methane, a potent greenhouse gas. What are the implications of these dramatic developments in the Arctic? Scientists and local communities alike are struggling to grasp the scale of the methane threat and what it means for our climate future. (Premiered February 2, 2022)

In the Arctic, enormous releases of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, threaten the climate.

Arctic Sinkholes

The top half of Jupiter in blue and green against a night sky

A composite image of Jupiter using images captured by the James Webb Space Telescope. Image Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, Jupiter ERS Team; image processing by Judy Schmidt.

Explore the cosmos, delve into ancient history, and follow an extreme rescue with NOVA’s most-watched documentaries released in 2022.

NOVA’s most popular science documentaries of 2022

Four bright orange loops brand off of a dark blue blob

A transmission electron micrograph of HIV-1 virus particles (orange) replicating from the plasma membrane of an infected H9 T cell. Credit: NIAID, Flickr

Scientists have cured a handful of people of HIV by piggybacking on treatments they received for blood cancer. But does that bring a widespread cure any closer?

Take a Ride into a Supermassive Black Hole

Support Provided By

Explore More

NOVA Universe Revealed: Big Bang

NOVA Universe Revealed: Black Holes

Sagittarius A: The Void at the Center of our Galaxy

Transcript

Credits

Support Provided By

Explore More

NOVA Universe Revealed: Big Bang

NOVA Universe Revealed: Black Holes

Sagittarius A: The Void at the Center of our Galaxy