Do Black holes really allow Faster than light travel?

[SuperTechmarine]

I once read about Black Holes in Wikipedia (Unreliable i know) and apparently Time slows down inside them.

They compare with 2 dudes racing by a mountain.

The 1st guy (Us) goes through a tunnel(Black Hole) under the mountain.

the other guy goes over and around the mountain taking more time.

How could this be applied to Faster Than Light travel?

[Vanoi]

How would a man survive going through a black hole in the first place?

[Humble Warrior]

I saw a docu about this.

Scientists basically don`t know what happens if you go through a black hole. They reckon you`ll instantly die, but basically they do not know.

However, a black hole apparently has enough power to run a Time machine so you could probably power a faster than light engine with it, as long as the engine could withstand it. This would become your Time machine. So I guess you could invent a Time machine, harness the energy of a black hole to power it, then just travel into the past to the bet period and then provide your past self the power to Time travel forward and get to the other side of the hill before the other guy had even thought of the idea.

[Jack04]

a) Wikipedia is a perfectly good source.

b) Time stops completely at the singularity at the centre of a black hole.

c) I don't see how that would contribute to faster than light travel. The very fact that black-holes cause a distortion of time is a construct of general relativity, which itself requires the speed of light to be the limit.

[DisgruntledGoat]

b) Time stops completely at the singularity at the centre of a black hole.

For the observer outside the black hole, its comparable to an object moving at the speed of light and time dilation. I.E. watch something fall into the black hole it will eventually stop moving and look frozen in time.

For the object falling in time moves at the same pace. So if someone were to fall into a black hole and somehow survive and come out of it time will have jumped forward considerably.

[Shea O'Gorath]

It seems lee of traveling the speed of light and more of being in a state of timelessness so when you reemerge it is the future. However going in the past....

More than likely your ship would be destroyed by the force of a million hurricanes. (for effect not a reliable source)

[Denny Crane!]

From what I have read the only theoretically possible way to travel faster than light is to create an effect that effectively means you exist without mass. This was a theoretcal effect of a particular form of nanostructure which incidentally would remove problems like travelling FTL would make it impossible to navigate around things and it would be impossible not to perish whether from a speck of dust or from a meteor or a sun.

[Admiral Piett]

If we're talking white holes and Fecund universes, then sure - as the theory goes.

[Aanker]

Even with wormholes you wouldn't be travelling faster than light, just arrive at another point in the universe faster than light travelling the conventional way would.

[Sphere]

Two new big name papers have just been put out on black hole phenomenon.

They suggest matter gets annihilated at the event horizon, long before you reach the actual singularity (where time/space cease to exist). Which doesn't bode well for one of science fictions favorite methods of time/space travel.

[Nevins]

Two new big name papers have just been put out on black hole phenomenon.

They suggest matter gets annihilated at the event horizon, long before you reach the actual singularity (where time/space cease to exist). Which doesn't bode well for one of science fictions favorite methods of time/space travel.

Pretty much. Even if we could somehow penetrate the event horizon, just getting to that point would put titanic strains on any object approaching it, ripping them to pieces before they could get close.

[visser300]

Pretty much. Even if we could somehow penetrate the event horizon, just getting to that point would put titanic strains on any object approaching it, ripping them to pieces before they could get close.

Then why dont we just "open" the black hole bigger to fix a space ship?

[LSJ]

If black holes can tear apart entire galaxies, I doubt anyone could build a spaceship that could survive going into one without being crushed into a singularity.

Even if you could, being held in a black hole for (b?)millions of years really ups your travel time...

[SuperTechmarine]

How do Wormholes work exactly again?

[Admiral Piett]

The wiki article describes it quite summarily. Physics and mathematics certainly isn't my forte, but this just what I've read both online and from books I used to read about it intensively when I was in high school. The idea is that wormholes are figuratively a black hole (or two black holes) that break a path through space-time to another place or time in space. The nickname 'wormhole' is for an Einstein-Rosen bridge between two different places in space and time. However, even theoretically, they are extremely unstable and would likely form and collapse almost instantaneously. Quantum foam theory seems to justify this. The only possible theoretical way to form a longer lasting wormhole would be through something called 'negative matter' or anti-matter. Stephen Hawking and Kip Thorne believe they have discovered that such antimatter exists in the casimir effect. But harnessing such great forces would be probably impossible.

So in other words, if wormholes can or do exist, they automatically collapse and the fabric of space-time corrects itself in a way. Like brief bubbles in a pond.

This is how gravity from regular things and a black hole affects space-time. Even neutron stars are quite dangerous. Basically black holes have a 'singularity' which is the infinitely dense old material from the star that collapsed inward on its own weight. Any energy or mass that is 'eaten' by the hole and doesn't escape through its polar jets (like quasars) become part of the singularity and the black hole 'grows' in mass. This is how supermassive black holes form and how even galaxies are totally dependant on a supermassive black hole in the very center. Think of a galaxy like a giant whirlpool swirling around the drain, only we are spinning so fast around the drain that we never get sucked in.




This is a wormhole






As you can see, its like a black hole has 'broken through' the fabric of space time to make a hole somewhere on 'the other side'.

[SuperTechmarine]

Thats a pretty good explanation for a noob like me.

How are we even supposed to get anti-Matter anyways?

[visser300]

Wow, you are trying to say that we are circling around a supermasive black hole? Is there any chance that one day we will sink into that hole (even the timescale is billion years)

[Admiral Piett]

Wow, you are trying to say that we are circling around a supermasive black hole? Is there any chance that one day we will sink into that hole (even the timescale is billion years)

Astronomers have more or less 'confirmed' the presence of a supermassive black hole in the center of the Milky Way. They made this discovery recently that supermassive black holes have been more or less 'proven' to be at the center of most galaxies.


This is a really good documentary on it and how exactly they discovered it. They also prove their findings with physics made easy for us laymen. Watch it in full if you want to learn something really interesting and fundamental about how the universe works.





However, to answer the second part of your question - no. We will never be dragged into the middle of the galaxy and be eaten by it. Remember also that there is not just a single supermassive black hole, but in the galactic bulge, there are probably millions of small black holes surrounding it due to the chaotic forces and gravitational surges from all those billions of stars being so close to each other.

The documentary will tell you how you can quite safely orbit a black hole at a reasonably close distance and never fall in. Just the closer you get, the faster you have to orbit or the gravity will start to become overbearing. As this one guy says "It will never reach out and grab you, but if you just happen to get a little too close - it's got you."

As Sphere said, if the Sun turned into a black hole, Earth would probably survive. But of course all life on the planet will die without the sun's light and energy which keeps us warm, keeps the weather moving, and keeps the oxygen going. Also, black holes have a tendency to emit excruciating radiation bursts (from all the light and gas being sucked in) which would probably kill anyone before they even got anywhere near it. So none of us will ever have to feel the effects of spaghettification.


As far as wormholes are concerned, it is probably next to impossible for us to emulate one, considering you have to make a black hole 'safe' for travel, you have to use impossible to get antimatter to keep it open, and you have to deal with the fact that a wormhole could theoretically take you anywhere in the void and probably billions of years into the future. So we can scratch that idea for faster than light travel.


EDIT: Our collision with Andromeda will probably not affect our solar system all that much because most of the stars will simply pass by each other. Stars are simply too far apart to collide with one another, even in the galactic center. Astronomers have stressed that we are even at this very moment absorbing dwarf galaxies that have collided with us. Andromeda is much bigger than we are though, and it's likely that the beautiful spirals our galaxy has will be disrupted and the stars will go into weird orbital changes, becoming a big mess.

[SuperTechmarine]

Of Course, Galaxies are dependant on their Supermassive Black Hole to sustain itself. Supermassive Black Holes have so much gravity, they are the only things keeping galaxies together.


BTW Does the Andromeda galaxy threaten us in any way?

[Sphere]

Black holes have no more mass than the stars that created them. It is just more highly concentrated mass which creates infinite warping of space/time around it.

If tomorrow the sun turned into a black whole, the Earths orbit would remain unchanged.