Black holes skirt the line between
science fiction and science fact.
On the one hand, scientists have seen real black holes
in action, consuming unsuspecting stars that pass too close.
But where reality ends and fiction takes over,
is at the edge of a black hole:
a place called the event horizon
where no spacecraft has ever gone.
So, whatever happens beyond that boundary
inside of a black hole is anyone's guess.
Scientists agree that if you travel far enough
into a black hole, gravity will eventually become
so strong that it kills anything in its path.
But sci-fi films are more optimistic,
depicting black holes as portals through
space and time or gateways to other dimensions.
And it turns out, some scientists now think
the sci-fi buffs may be onto something.
Black holes might be suitable
for hyperspace travel after all.
It just takes the right kind of black hole.
At the center of every black hole is a point
of infinite density called a singularity.
It's what gives black holes their strong
gravitational pull,
and for decades,
scientists thought singularities
were all the same.
So anything that passed the event horizon would be
destroyed the same way: by being stretched and pulled
like an infinitely long piece of spaghetti.
But that all changed in the early 1990s,
when different research teams in Canada and the U.S.
discovered a second singularity
called a mass inflation singularity.
It still has a strong gravitational pull,
but it would only stretch you by a finite amount,
and potentially not kill you in the process,
meaning you might survive the trip through a black hole.
More specifically, through a large rotating black hole,
which is where these types of singularities exist.
Now, astronomers obviously can't travel through
a black hole yet to test this theory.
In fact, the best place to test this
is at the supermassive black hole in the center
of our home galaxy, the Milky Way,
which is 27,000 light-years away -
not conveniently close to say the least.
Therefore, scientists instead run computer simulations
to see what would happen if we did manage to reach
an isolated, rotating black hole.
And now, for the first time, a team of scientists
at UMass Dartmouth and Georgia Gwinnett College
have done exactly that.
You will create a slight
increase in temperature,
but it would not be a dramatic increase.
It's just that you don't
have enough time
to respond to the very strong forces there.
It would just go through you too quickly.
He added that passing through a weak singularity
is like quickly running your finger through
a candle flame that's one thousand degrees Celsius.
If you hold your finger in the flame long enough,
you'll get burned,
but pass your finger through quickly,
and you'll barely feel a thing.
Similarly, if you pass though a weak singularity
with the right speed and momentum
and at the right time, you may not feel much at all.
As for what happens once you get through
to the other side, no one really knows.
But Burko has his own ideas.
He says, one possibility is that we'd arrive
at some other remote part of our galaxy.
Potentially light-years away from any plants or stars.
But a second, perhaps more intriguing possibility,
is that we'd arrive in a different galaxy altogether.
That's if you even make it that far.
Scientists say more research is needed
before we're anywhere close to successfully
traveling through a black hole.
But when we are ready, one of the safest passageways
might be the supermassive black hole
at the center of our galaxy.
And it might just be our ticket out of the Milky Way.