Viewing a single comment thread. View all comments

jaydfox t1_j2bqat6 wrote

Haha, no, but I do watch a fair amount or space channels (PBS Space Time, Dr. Becky, Anton Petrov, etc.).

One thing worth mentioning is that you'll eventually be spaghettified, no matter how big the black hole is. If a stellar mass black hole has an event horizon of about 3 km (I think, not positive), then a 1 million stellar mass black hole would have an event horizon of about 3 million km. But only when you get within 300 km of the singularity, would the tidal forces be as strong as at the event horizon of the stellar mass black hole. For the largest known black hole (66 billion solar masses, off the top of my head, but maybe there's a bigger one), the event horizon would be about 200 billion km in radius, about 2% of a light-year (so 0.04 light-years in diameter). But the tidal forces wouldn't be as strong as at the event horizon of a stellar mass black hole, until you were about 12,000 km from the singularity. This is due to the rapid decay of tidal forces with distance.

So in that sense, the person you were replying to was right. You will be spaghettified before you get anywhere near the hypothetical singularity, no matter how big. But with a big enough black hole, you'd get pretty deep into the black hole before you get ripped apart. Long enough to make interesting observations. Which is what the OP was asking about. What would you see if you fell into a large enough black hole? Long after you've crossed the event horizon, and long before you get close enough to the singularity to be ripped apart by tidal forces. I assume you would see stuff that fell in right after you, and stuff that fell in right before you. (If not, that implies you wouldn't even see your feet after they went in, if you went in feet first. And I seem to recall several different authors saying you would hardly notice yourself pass through the event horizon.) How much longer before and after? I assume the cosmic background radiation behind / above you would be blue shifted from microwave into infrared, visible, eventually ultraviolet, xrays, etc. Whether you get ripped apart before witnessing that, I don't know. I'd like to know.

5