Name: Something Weird Happens Inside A Black Hole (feat. Brian Cox)
Uploaded: 2025-04-27T14:42:09.000Z
Duration: 19 min 39 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

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Imagine that you're flying through space, when suddenly you start to get dragged toward a dark abyss.

Time begins to warp and you start to feel this strange sensation of being stretched.

You're falling into a black hole, one of the most astonishing places in our universe.

Some are so big that they can fit over 60 of our solar systems across them.

With masses up to 100 billion times our sun.

And once you fall past a certain point, nothing can escape.

I wanted to know the latest cutting-edge research about black holes, so I called up my favorite physicist, Dr. Brian Cox, to answer the question, if you fell into a black hole, what would actually happen to you?

And what does our newest science tell us is really happening inside a black hole?

Black holes are one of the strangest things in existence.

You come face to face with the structure of space and time.

Imagine that you and I are on a mission to fall into a black hole, and we have some imaginary spaceship that can take us as far and as fast as we want.

What is a black hole, and how do we find them?

So essentially, what's the idea behind a black hole?

Let's say you take the sun, a star the mass of the sun, and you just collapse it, and you keep on collapsing it, and you squash it, and you keep on squashing it, and you squash it down, and you squash it and squash it until its radius becomes three kilometers.  If you artificially squashed all of that mass into that tiny little space, the gravity right at its surface would be immense.

So immense that if you wanted to escape, the speed you'd have to travel to escape its gravitational pull, it's called the escape velocity, would exceed the speed of light.

So even light rays emitted from the surface, if you could squash it down that far, would just stay there.

A spot so massive, with gravity so strong, that not even light can escape.

At first, black holes were just a mathematical quirk, a weird solution to equations that seemed to otherwise fit our universe.

Over decades, scientists measured the movement of stars and galaxies and gases that were warped by seemingly empty patches of space, left behind, we now know, by the collapsing death of stars much larger than our sun.

We can now tell they're all over our universe.

Some estimates say there are up to 40 quintillion of them.

And almost every galaxy has a supermassive black hole at its center, including our own Milky Way.

Let's imagine that we choose the black hole at the center of our own galaxy.

So here, the light, you might say, what is the light in this picture?

So it's not from the black hole, because we've just said black holes trap light.

It's from what's called the accretion disk.

This is another way that scientists have found black holes, by spotting their glowing accretion disks.

So you're to imagine the material spiraling around in orbit, around this very dense object, and very violently orbiting.

Wait, so then why in this photo do we not see the accretion disk across the middle?

Well, it turns out that we happen to be seeing this particular black hole from above.

But if you were to see it from edge on, something very weird starts to happen.

What we're seeing is actually the accretion disk in front of, and behind, the black hole.

Because the black hole's gravity is so immense, it's causing light to be bent and distorted around it.

So imagine this disk of material around this thing, and then light rays, let's say, from your perspective, from behind the black hole, go around into your eyes.

Sometimes they orbit and then go around into your eyes.

And they go into your eyes from every point on the disk, from underneath and at the top and behind.

So you have light rays going always around this thing, so you see that.

And in our little spaceship, we're getting closer.

As we approach, I start to wonder, how big is this thing?

Based on the way it pulls at the stars around it, scientists estimate that the black hole at the center of our galaxy has a mass of 4.3 million times our Sun.

But if you plopped it down inside our solar system, this black hole would only extend to about one-fifth of Mercury's average orbit.

So it's shockingly small for its immense mass.

And compared to other black holes, ours is just… medium.

One of the smallest black holes ever found is J1650.

Its diameter is only about as long as Manhattan, but it has a mass of 3.8 times our Sun.

One step up would be the black hole in Messier 15.

It's about twice the diameter of Earth, with a mass of 4,000 Suns.

Okay, now we're at the lower limit of what's considered a supermassive black hole.

This one is just under half the diameter of our Sun, but about 100,000 times its mass.

The black hole in the galaxy M87 weighs 5.4 billion Suns.

You could fit our solar system around four times across it.

It was the first one we ever got a picture of in 2019.

And this is one of the largest black holes ever discovered, TON 618.

It weighs 66 billion times more than our Sun.

And it could fit nearly 40 of our solar systems across it.

Phoenix A seems to have a mass of 100 billion Suns.

But since this black hole is closer, we're seeing what it looks like more recently than TON 618, which might have grown since.

And these are just the biggest ones we know of.

There could be an even more massive one, just waiting to be found.

And now, we're starting to get pulled into one.

So we're falling towards this thing now, and we turn our rocket motors off.

So it's like the astronauts on the International Space Station.

So we could be approaching this in this room now, and we would have no clue that that's what's happening.

What about when we're in the accretion desk?

Wouldn't we be banged around by a lot of stuff?

We might get in a bit of a mess as we fell through the accretion desk.

But let's say that our room, this spacecraft, is magically insulated from radiation and heat and all those things.

One of the most shocking things, from the point of view of someone outside, the description is very different.

Okay, now imagine you, yes, you, watching this.

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Something Weird Happens Inside A Black Hole (feat. Brian Cox)

stuff

perspective

weird

incredible