If you are complaining that Earth is bad enough, a black hole is the last place in the Universe where you would want to be. The gravitational force is so strong that it attracts even light, and perhaps the scariest part of a black hole is that you don’t know for sure what happens to you once you get sucked in.
But how close can you get to a black hole without being in danger? A team of scientists recently tried to find the answer to the question.
The ISCO threshold
A threshold called the innermost stable circular orbit (ISCO) is the closest point you can approach a black hole without facing impending doom. The researchers involved used a technique that relies on reverberation mapping. They considered that different regions surrounding the black hole light up in different ways.
When gas flows from the accretion disk and passes the ISCO — the innermost part from the accretion disk — and into the black hole, it emits a broad swath of high-energy X-ray radiation.
Black holes: portals to other Universes?
Some scientists had been theorizing that falling into a black hole could not necessarily mean that you’re doomed. It can actually become beneficial as you get the chance to travel to other Universes or back in time like in the Interstellar movie. The American astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson suggested that it’s ridiculous to believe that a human can survive falling into a black hole.
Luckily for us humans, there’s no black hole too near to our planet. And if, by some chance, one appears someday, we highly recommend you to not afford going anywhere near it. It’s not worth the risk, and Interstellar was only a sci-fi movie.
The study regarding the ISCO was published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, and it was also uploaded to the preprint journal arXiv,
