With super massive black holes, you could pass the event horizon and not even know it. To you, everything would remain relatively (no pun intended) comfortable. You could live for a couple days, falling towards the singularity before the gravitational gradient becomes enough to rip you apart, thus ending your life.
I would assume that anything that lies within the photon sphere could never have a stable orbit. The photon sphere is the point that light itself orbits the black hole and its 1.5x the radius of the blackhole itself. Anything closer to the singularity than this boundry is doomed to fall into the singularity as it would require faster than light speeds to maintain any stable orbit.
I wonder if anything could actually cross the photon sphere at all without getting vaporized by potentially billions of years of accumulated light that got stuck orbiting the black hole.
Hell, forget the photon sphere, even. Know that jet of energy black holes are thought to sprew out at their poles due to the material falling in to them? Imagine what that material is doing inside the event horizon. Whatever it is, it’ll be pretty violent, enough to call the moon slamming into the earth “relatively peaceful”. It would probably be more pleasant hanging out in the core of the sun than even an AU away from a black hole’s event horizon (and I mean on the outside).
Also, the event horizon is where light cannot escape. The “spacecraft event horizon”, or the orbital plane surrounding a black hole where a spacecraft couldn’t escape it is going to be much farther out, unless we can figure out ftl travel.
If I recall correctly, the photon sphere orbit is unstable, so there may not be a ton of photons there. “Unstable” in this sense means that photons in adjacent orbits tend to diverge away from the photon sphere orbit rather than toward it.
For Schwarzchild holes, the lowest circular orbit for massive objects is at 3 event horizons, which is above the photon sphere. There are unstable circular orbits down to 2 horizons. Black hole rotation reduces this altitude for prograde orbits asymptotically down to 1 horizon.
With super massive black holes, you could pass the event horizon and not even know it. To you, everything would remain relatively (no pun intended) comfortable. You could live for a couple days, falling towards the singularity before the gravitational gradient becomes enough to rip you apart, thus ending your life.
Now I have a doubt. Could you have a stable orbit around the singularity but inside the event horizon? Or is the orbit speed above c?
Maybe you could live a comfy life there.
I would assume that anything that lies within the photon sphere could never have a stable orbit. The photon sphere is the point that light itself orbits the black hole and its 1.5x the radius of the blackhole itself. Anything closer to the singularity than this boundry is doomed to fall into the singularity as it would require faster than light speeds to maintain any stable orbit.
I wonder if anything could actually cross the photon sphere at all without getting vaporized by potentially billions of years of accumulated light that got stuck orbiting the black hole.
Hell, forget the photon sphere, even. Know that jet of energy black holes are thought to sprew out at their poles due to the material falling in to them? Imagine what that material is doing inside the event horizon. Whatever it is, it’ll be pretty violent, enough to call the moon slamming into the earth “relatively peaceful”. It would probably be more pleasant hanging out in the core of the sun than even an AU away from a black hole’s event horizon (and I mean on the outside).
Also, the event horizon is where light cannot escape. The “spacecraft event horizon”, or the orbital plane surrounding a black hole where a spacecraft couldn’t escape it is going to be much farther out, unless we can figure out ftl travel.
If I recall correctly, the photon sphere orbit is unstable, so there may not be a ton of photons there. “Unstable” in this sense means that photons in adjacent orbits tend to diverge away from the photon sphere orbit rather than toward it.
For Schwarzchild holes, the lowest circular orbit for massive objects is at 3 event horizons, which is above the photon sphere. There are unstable circular orbits down to 2 horizons. Black hole rotation reduces this altitude for prograde orbits asymptotically down to 1 horizon.
…which is why you need technology so powerful it can protect you from a singularity.
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