15 Facts About Black Holes That'll Blow Your Effing Mind

If life were a run through Wonderland, the rabbit hole might just be a black hole, and here’s how deep it gets. The theory of quantum gravity seems to suggest every black hole contains a new universe that stretches out beyond our own. This could mean that entering a black hole could be like opening a doorway and stepping into an alternate reality. That is, if you survived going through a black hole.

Scientists have long played with the notion that our universe contains millions of black holes, invisible death traps spiraling around the atmosphere in space. But in modern times, a new concept has unearthed an even more mind-boggling possibility - our universe exists inside of a black hole. This popular theory opens up possibilities for things previously thought fictional, like time travel and parallel worlds, because if a black hole is a doorway rather than a deathtrap, we all stand to enter into a realm where the laws of nature no longer apply.

Because black holes are masters of distortion and the universe at large, they don’t obey the natural laws of time. They are surrounded by approximately 15 million miles of darkness and their mass consequently slows down time in a process known as time dilation. This process concludes that traveling faster makes time move slower. Could it be the key to time travel isn’t in an actual vessel but rather through a hole? Stephen Hawking and several other geniuses seem to think so.

Black holes don’t just give birth to universes, they also swallow them whole. If one were to come into contact with our planet, all weapons of mass destruction combined would not be able to compete with the phenomenon that would inevitably follow. In fact, literally nothing we’ve ever seen is comparable to the deadly force of a black hole. Upon contact (and by contact we mean coming within about a billion miles of these things) our solar system would simply spin out of control and we would all be ripped to shreds. Scientists call this spaghettification. 

Spaghettification is a made up word describing what black holes do to anything within a billion mile radius. When a black hole spaghettifies something (or someone) it stretches them to death using horizontal compression and extreme tidal force. This agonizing routine could go on for a very long time, depending mainly on the size of the black hole itself. But why spaghetti? Because when a mass comes into contact with a black hole, it compresses everything into noodle-like shapes. Sometimes this is also called the noodle effect. 

Should you, for any given reason, get sucked in by a black hole, you will not be spit back out. You will simply vanish without a trace. It will be as if you never existed. This is because nothing can enter into a black hole and exit unless, of course it exits out the other side, alive and intact. And even then, theoretically you'd be in another universe, so you would never be heard from again. Let’s say that were the case for a person. They would still disappear as the black hole dissolves, shrinking down into an unfathomable, astronomical smallness.