![]() ![]() Of course, much of the technical details of how they worked were wrong but it would be Albert Einstein 131 years later and his theory of general relativity that give us a framework with which to understand the barely believable idea of holes in space and time. John Michell was so far ahead of the curve on black holes that he was mostly ignored by his contemporaries and it wasn’t until the 1970s that his writings were rediscovered. This was a remarkably accurate prediction from over 2 centuries ago and something that was only recently been confirmed in 2015 by the discovery of a supermassive black hole now called Sagittarius A star at the centre of the Milkyway by the Chandra X-ray telescope and a group of stars apparently orbiting empty space which gave away its location. He called these “Dark stars” and even suggested that they could be found by tracking their gravitational effects on the orbits of nearby normal stars. ![]() Now contrary to what you may think that black holes are a 20 th-century phenomenon, something that we have only thought about since Einstein’s theory of relativity, in 1784 some 238 years ago, the English natural philosopher John Michell proposed that there could be natural bodies in space, some form of star, whose mass could be so large and the gravity they exhibited could be so great that even if they produced light, it could not escape and would fall back to the surface. How long our unlucky astronaut might survive in a place where our current knowledge about space and time collapse just like the dying star that created it, it’s always going to be speculation although some of the latest theories pose some interesting outcomes, none of which would be particularly helpful to our astronaut though. They will still be in radio contact with the main craft until they reach the event horizon but once over it, how long will our astronaut survive, a second, a minute, an hour, or forever? Well, let’s see what our current thinking tells us about the matter.Īs with anything to do with space, black holes and Einstein’s theory it’s all relative. The ship and crew can’t move in to help because they can’t risk being pulled in too.Īfter the initial panic, our astronaut becomes resigned to the fact that this will be a one-way journey. However, through no fault of their own, an astronaut finds themselves outside the spacecraft and pulled towards the event horizon. Imagine we are at some point in future on a mission to study black holes and orbiting near the photon sphere, an area just far enough away where photons of light travel fast enough to settle into an orbit and don’t get pulled into the event horizon.
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