Falling into a black hole

Fall into the black hole at the centre of our galaxy: what you would see, what you would feel, and how long you would have

A what-if: physics allows it on paper, but no one has ever seen one. Everything shown follows the theory as it stands.

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Step by step

Sagittarius A*

You are falling from far away, so you feel no force at all, and the hole lies straight ahead. Its shadow is the black disc, edged by bent starlight, and the Milky Way's bright centre lies right behind it. The faint hot gas that really circles this hole is drawn, as a model, only on High and Ultra graphics.

Falling in

Gravity is not a force pulling on you but a curve in space, and you follow it freely. Seen another way, space itself flows into the hole and carries you along, as a river carries a leaf. This picture, the river model, gives the same answers as Einstein's equations.

The black disc ahead is the hole's shadow. Light from the stars behind it is bent around the hole, so the stars near its edge are smeared into a ring, and the same patch of sky can show up more than once. Your own speed also crowds the stars forward, towards the hole.

The tide

Falling feels like floating, until the tide: your feet fall faster than your head. At this hole the stretch is tiny, but a hole of 10 Suns would tear you apart long before its horizon.

The horizon

At one horizon radius the flow of space reaches light's speed. You cross it without feeling a thing, and from then on there is no way back.

There is no wall at the horizon, no flash, nothing a short experiment could measure. It is a point of no return, not a place. Light aimed outward from it just stays where it is, and inside it everything, light too, is carried towards the centre.

Inside

Inside the horizon every path leads to the centre. The view ahead is black, and the outside universe crowds into the view behind you, dimmer and redder.

Inside the horizon the centre is no longer a place ahead of you but a moment in your future, like tomorrow: you cannot stop, slow down or turn from it, however strong your engines. Even light aimed outward is dragged inward by the flow, so the forward view is dark.