Featured Image Credit: Malte Mueller via Getty
While it's not exactly surprising that any encounter with a black hole would leave you in a gruesome situation, one scientist has revealed exactly how you'd be left if you ended up walking into one.
Black holes, formed from the collapse of massive stars through the process of a supernova, are some of the universe's most horrifying features, yet they have seemingly existed since the very start.
They are powerful enough to swallow entire planets and even galaxies whole, and simply cannot be stopped once created, posing an incredible threat to anything that falls within its path, as simulations have shown.
Understandably then it wouldn't exactly be a good idea for humans to encounter one while its active, and although the smallest versions – which can be up to 100,000 times smaller than a paper clip – aren't as dangerous as their larger cousins, the reality of this encounter would be gruesome no matter what.
Advert
As reported by the Daily Mail, Professor Roberty Scherrer of Vanderbilt University in Nashville estimates that the force of a black hole would be enough to tear your brain's cells apart from the inside out, so you should probably stay away from one wherever possible.
"A sufficiently large primordial black hole, about the size of an asteroid or larger, would cause serious injury or death if it passed through you," the physicist estimates, adding that "it would behave like a gunshot."
These primordial black holes have been there since the universe began, and have likely been drifting around and slowly shrinking in size for the last 13.8 billion years.
Upon 'impact' with the human body it would transfer both supersonic shock and tidal forces: two forms of energy that are absolutely deadly for the human body.
You would experience shockwaves equivalent to the impact of a large-caliber bullet as shockwaves would spread energy throughout your body's tissue in the shape of a cone, and your internal organs would be immediately ruptured by this, causing immense internal bleeding.
If the tidal forces of the black hole are strong enough then it could quite literally tear your body apart upon impact, as gravity would pull on one part of your body with greater force than the other, effectively ripping it from the rest.
The size would very much determine quite how much damage this black hole would cause to your body, yet even one that's comparatively small would have an immense impact if it were to strike your brain, tearing the cells apart and creating a shockwave powerful enough to kill you instantly.
