The Black Hole’s Wall of Fire

Incineration, not spaghettification

Classical physics tells us that crossing the event horizon of a black hole is a serene experience. It is a decisive moment; once you’ve crossed this point there is no way to return to your home here on the sea-and-verdure Earth. And yet it isn’t a moment that’s explosive or even violent. It feels like slipping onward, down towards the singularity uninhibited and swallowed by this distorted, rich darkness of the black hole sphere. It is only later when you near the singularity that gravity pulls your delicate body out painfully in the process of spaghettification. But the perhaps eerie calm before your death is what’s referred to in physics as “no-drama”. An equivalency principle, it stems from the work of Einstein which says that free falling into a black hole wouldn’t feel any different because everything around you is falling as well.

Sacrificing this principle and suggesting that there is drama when crossing into the black hole results in a spectacular phenomenon. Just at the event horizon there forms a blinding, broiling wall of radiation. It’s a seething kind of heat that would overtake any traveler and burn them alive in an instant. As inhospitable as the immense heat at the universe’s creation, it would be an impossible boundary to cross. This image of a black hole’s vibrant wall of fire arises from a…