Astronomers now believe that black holes lie at the centers of most galaxies. They classify these beasts as super-massive black holes because each one may have a maximum mass equivalent to billions of suns. Stellar black holes are the remains of dying stars that have collapsed upon themselves. They're smaller than their super-massive cousins -- the smallest is about 12 miles (19 kilometers) across -- and may be quite common in any galaxy The closest stellar black hole to our solar system is Cygnus X-1, which is about 6,000 light-years away.
Black holes are without question some of the strangest places in the universe. So massive that they hideously deform space and time, so dense that their centers are called "points at infinity," and pitch- black because not even light can escape them, it isn't surprising that so many people wonder what it would be like to visit one.
It's not exactly a restive vacation spot, as it turns out.
when an object crosses a black hole's "event horizon" — its outer boundary, or point of no return — the same physics that causes Earth's ocean tides begins to take effect. Gravity's strength decreases with distance, so the moon pulls on the side of the Earth closer to it a bit more vigorously than the side farther from it, and as a result, Earth elongates ever so slightly in the direction of the moon.
The land is sturdy, so it doesn't move much, but the water on Earth's surface is fluid, so it flows along the elongated axis. "That's the tidal interaction," In that case, you would get to experience the effects of the curvature of space-time, predicted by Einstein's general theory of relativity, firsthand.Your body would be shredded apart into the smallest possible pieces. Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History, who wrote the definitive account Death by Black Hole, imagined the experience as "the most spectacular way to die in space."
"First of all, you approach the speed of light as you fall into the black hole. So the faster you move through space, the slower you move through time," he said. "Furthermore, as you fall, there are things that have been falling in front of you that have experienced an even greater 'time dilation' than you have. So if you're able to look forward toward the black hole, you see every object that has fallen into it in the past. And then if you look backwards, you'll be able to see everything that will ever fall into the black hole behind you.
"So the upshot is, you'll get to see the entire history of that spot in the universe simultaneously," he said, "from the Big Bang all the way into the distant future."
watch this video for more detail about black holes
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