While black holes are commonly shown as dark regions that appear to eat the disk-like matter around them, what you’d actually see is vastly different than this representation. Particularly if you fell inside. Image credit: Birmingham Libraries.

What Would You See As You Fell Into A Black Hole?

Would there be only blackness past the event horizon? Or something more?

Black holes are some of the most perplexing objects in the entire Universe. Objects so dense, where gravitation is so strong, that nothing, not even light, can ever escape from it. Many physical black holes have been identified, from stellar-mass scale ones in our own galaxy to supermassive ones at the centers of the majority of galaxies, many millions or even billions of times the mass of our Sun. The key property surrounding the event horizon, that light can never escape from within it, sets up a boundary in space: once you cross it, you’re doomed to hit the central singularity. But what would you see as you fell in? Would the lights stay on, or would the Universe go dark? At last, physics has deciphered the answer, and it’s gorgeous.

The supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy, Sagittarius A*, flares brightly in X-rays whenever matter is devoured. We have not yet directly imaged the black hole there, but the Event Horizon Telescope, from 25,000 light years away, aims to change that. Image credit: X-ray: NASA/UMass/D.Wang et al., IR: NASA/STScI.

At the center of our own galaxy, we’ve been able to observe the motions of stars around a central point mass with a mass around 4 million solar masses that emits no light at all. This object in particular — Sagittarius A* — is a surefire candidate for a black hole, something we can tell directly by measuring the…