However, if the material composing the Earth still managed to emit or reflect the ambient light, it would remain opaque, and we’d be able to see what happened to the surface beneath our feet as we fell. The only exception is what we’d see: as we looked down, a black hole would simply distort the space beneath our feet while we fell down towards it, resulting in bent light due to gravitational lensing. If that’s what the Earth beneath our feet does, however, what would a human being on Earth’s surface experience as the planet collapsed into a black hole beneath our feet?īelieve it or not, the physical story that we’d experience in this scenario would be identical to what would happen if we instantly replaced the Earth with an Earth-mass black hole. Johan Jarnestad/The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences His conception has been the gold standard in General Relativity ever since. physics of the spacetime, applicable to all observers at all points in space and at all instants in time, that governs a system such as this. When matter collapses, it can inevitably form a black hole. After somewhere between an estimated 10 and 20 minutes, enough matter would have gathered in the central few millimeters to form an event horizon for the first time.Īfter just a few minutes more - 21 to 22 minutes total - the entire mass of the Earth would have collapsed into a black hole just 1.75 centimeters (0.69”) in diameter: the inevitable result of an Earth’s mass worth of material collapsing into a black hole. Over the timescale of mere minutes, the density in the center would begin to rise fantastically, as material from all different radii passed through the exact center-of-mass of the Earth, simultaneously, over and over again. ![]() The volume of this material would shrink as it accelerated towards the center, while the mass would remain the same. In the central region, mass would accumulate, with its density steadily rising over time. Siegelįirst off, the material composing the solid Earth would immediately begin accelerating, as though it were in perfect free-fall, towards the center of the Earth. ![]() ![]() Nobel Media, The Nobel Committee for Physics annotations by E. of how a realistic object in our Universe, such as a star (or any collection of matter), can form an event horizon and how all the matter bound to it will inevitably encounter the central singularity. One of the most important contributions of Roger Penrose to black hole physics is the demonstration.
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