Black holes skirt the line between
science fiction and science fact.
On the one hand, scientists
have seen real black holes
in action, consuming unsuspecting
stars that pass too close.
But where reality ends
and fiction takes over,
is at the edge of a black hole:
a place called the event horizon
where no spacecraft has ever gone.
So, whatever happens beyond that boundary
inside of a black hole is anyone's guess.
Scientists agree that
if you travel far enough
into a black hole, gravity
will eventually become
so strong that it kills
anything in its path.
But sci-fi films are more optimistic,
depicting black holes as portals through
space and time or gateways
to other dimensions.
And it turns out, some
scientists now think
the sci-fi buffs may be onto something.
Black holes might be suitable
for hyperspace travel after all.
It just takes the right
kind of black hole.
At the center of every
black hole is a point
of infinite density called a singularity.
It's what gives black holes their strong
gravitational pull,
and for decades,
scientists thought singularities
were all the same.
So anything that passed
the event horizon would be
destroyed the same way: by
being stretched and pulled
like an infinitely long
piece of spaghetti.
But that all changed in the early 1990s,
when different research
teams in Canada and the U.S.
discovered a second singularity
called a mass inflation singularity.
It still has a strong gravitational pull,
but it would only stretch
you by a finite amount,
and potentially not
kill you in the process,
meaning you might survive the
trip through a black hole.
More specifically, through
a large rotating black hole,
which is where these types
of singularities exist.
Now, astronomers obviously
can't travel through
a black hole yet to test this theory.
In fact, the best place to test this
is at the supermassive
black hole in the center
of our home galaxy, the Milky Way,
which is 27,000 light-years away -
not conveniently close to say the least.
Therefore, scientists instead
run computer simulations
to see what would happen
if we did manage to reach
an isolated, rotating black hole.
And now, for the first
time, a team of scientists
at UMass Dartmouth and
Georgia Gwinnett College
have done exactly that.
You will create a slight
increase in temperature,
but it would not be a dramatic increase.
It's just that you don't
have enough time
to respond to the very
strong forces there.
It would just go through you too quickly.
He added that passing
through a weak singularity
is like quickly running
your finger through
a candle flame that's one
thousand degrees Celsius.
If you hold your finger
in the flame long enough,
you'll get burned,
but pass your finger through quickly,
and you'll barely feel a thing.
Similarly, if you pass
though a weak singularity
with the right speed and momentum
and at the right time, you
may not feel much at all.
As for what happens once you get through
to the other side, no one really knows.
But Burko has his own ideas.
He says, one possibility
is that we'd arrive
at some other remote part of our galaxy.
Potentially light-years away
from any plants or stars.
But a second, perhaps more
intriguing possibility,
is that we'd arrive in a
different galaxy altogether.
That's if you even make it that far.
Scientists say more research is needed
before we're anywhere
close to successfully
traveling through a black hole.
But when we are ready, one
of the safest passageways
might be the supermassive black hole
at the center of our galaxy.
And it might just be our
ticket out of the Milky Way.
