What would it feel like to visit some of the strangest places in space?

Written by Laura Mears

B lack holes are some of the most feared objects in the universe, and falling into one might seem like the stuff of nightmares, but the reality might be less traumatising than you imagine.

If you came too close to a small black hole you would be torn apart before you even reached the event horizon, as tidal forces would stretch your body like spaghetti. However, if you circled a bigger black hole, like the one at the centre of the Milky Way, you’d be able to get right into the action. With the most massive black holes, the tidal forces outside of the event horizon are lessened, so you would be able to enter unharmed. However, as you cross over this horizon, the laws of physics go a bit wrong. To an outside observer you would appear to stretch as you approached it, and when you finally reached the edge you would stop, getting redder and dimmer. But from your point of view, you’d still be falling.

Inside the black hole, time dilates. You would be on a one-way trip towards the centre – apoint known as the singularity – but it would take a while to get there. Before you arrived there, you might have time to take in the sights, looking at the things that had fallen in before you and the things coming in behind.

1 LIVING ON A TWO-STAR WORLD

The idea of a world with two stars will be familiar to Star Wars fans, but it’s more than just science fiction. While we orbit a lone star, a lot of the stars that we can see come in pairs. In these ‘binary systems’, the stars are close enough that their gravitational fields interact, and they orbit together around a point called their common centre of mass, which usually sits somewhere in between them. It wasn’t always clear whether it was possible for a planet like Tatooine to exist around a pair of stars, but that all changed in 2011 when NASA announced the discovery of Kepler-16b, a Saturn-sized gas giant orbiting two stars, one red and one orange.