• Question: What happens if you throw a torch into a black hole?

    Asked by mallika to Chris, Dave, David, Fiona, Jack on 24 Jun 2013.
    • Photo: Jack Miller

      Jack Miller answered on 24 Jun 2013:

      Hi Mallika,

      In short, it wouldn’t be a torch any more! We’d be able to see distorted light from the torch being bent by the hole’s effect on space. This video has a good explanation of a lot of stuff to do with black holes, including lots of pretty pictures: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3pAnRKD4raY.

      As the torch fell into the hole, it’d be utterly destroyed — stretched out like a piece of spaghetti and compressed beyond the point where it could still be a torch.

      Hope this helps!

      — Jack

    • Photo: David Freeborn

      David Freeborn answered on 24 Jun 2013:

      The torch would fall into the black hole.

      As Jack says, it would be stretched out.

      Let’s suppose the torch was still able to function, and you had left the torch switched on (never do this in real life, as it wears out the battery).

      As the torch approached the black hole, the light would find it harder and harder to leave. At the edge of the black hole, the “event horizon”, the light would be stuck, unable to leave the Black Hole, but not being sucked in either. Any light that the torch emitted at that point would be “frozen” at the surface of the black hole.

      From our perspective, because we would see time for the torch slowing down as it reached the black hole, the torch would never get past that point. We would see the torch “smeared” over the surface of the black hole.

      Or rather, we wouldn’t see the torch at all, because the light would be trapped too, and couldn’t escape.

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