Falling Into a Black Hole

The black hole belongs to a quadruple stellar system, a binary binary. The system is fictional, but plausible.

After you are done dying at the central singularity of the black hole, feel free to explore more about the Schwarzschild geometry, about wormholes, about the collapse of a black hole, and about Hawking radiation.

© 1997, 1998 Andrew Hamilton. These pages last modified 19 Apr 2001.

The URL of this site is http://casa.colorado.edu/~ajsh/schw.shtml.

Movie Index

Approaching the black hole (89K GIF movie).	Firing a probe while orbiting the black hole (95K GIF movie).	Falling to the singularity (217K GIF movie).
Clicking on the text link gives you the movie in normal size. Clicking on the image gives you a double-size version of the same movie (same resolution, same number of K, just twice as big on the screen).

For explanations of these movies, and more, advance
  forward to   Approaching the Black Hole.

Falling Into a Black Hole: Index

1. Approaching the Black Hole

   • Movie
   • Caveats
   • The stellar system
   • The view from afar
   • Trajectory
   • Tidal forces
   • Einstein ring
   • Gravitational distortion of images
   • The Schwarzschild surface
   • The minimum stable circular orbit

2. Orbiting the Black Hole

   • Movie
   • Orbit
   • A Probe is fired
   • Second image of the Probe
   • Tidal stretching
   • Redshifting and freezing at the horizon

3. Falling to the Singularity of the Black Hole

   • Movie
   • The photon sphere
   • At the horizon, the Schwarzschild surface
   • The Schwarzschild bubble
   • The Schwarzschild bubble grows
   • Redshift map
   • Image distortion inside the black hole
   • The distortions grow
   • Just before you hit the singularity
   • The singularity

4. Dive into the Black Hole

   • The dive
   • Landing on a plane

5. More about the Schwarzschild Geometry

   • Schwarzschild geometry
   • Schwarzschild radius
   • Horizon
   • Schwarzschild metric
   • Embedding diagram
   • Gravitational slowing of time
   • Gravitational redshift
   • No stationary frames inside the Schwarzschild radius
   • Schwarzschild spacetime diagram
   • Eddington-Finkelstein spacetime diagram
   • Free-fall spacetime diagram
   • Kruskal-Szekeres spacetime diagram
   • Kruskal-Szekeres metric
   • Penrose diagram of the Schwarzschild geometry

6. White Holes and Wormholes

   • Schwarzschild wormhole
   • Do Schwarzschild wormholes really exist?
   • Kruskal-Szekeres spacetime diagram of the wormhole
   • Mirror Wormhole
     • Schwarzschild wormhole as a reflection?
     • Kruskal-Szekeres spacetime diagram for the `mirror' wormhole
     • Objections
   • Instability of the Schwarzschild wormhole
   • Impossible to pass through the wormhole
   • A Glimpse through the wormhole
   • Falling into a wormhole
   • Stabilizing a wormhole with exotic matter

7. Collapse of a Black Hole

   • Collapse of a uniform, pressureless sphere to a black hole
   • Image of the collapsed sphere
   • A spherical shell of matter falls on to the black hole
   • Eddington-Finkelstein spacetime diagram of the collapsing sphere
   • Kruskal-Szekeres spacetime diagram of the collapsing sphere
   • Penrose diagram of the collapsing sphere
   • A potted history of spacetime diagrams

8. Charged Black Holes: The Reissner-Nordström Geometry

9. The Extremal Reissner-Nordström Geometry

10. Hawking Radiation

    • Hawking radiation
    • Evaporation of a mini black hole

11. Black Hole Quiz

  Forward to Approaching the Black Hole

  Andrew Hamilton's Homepage

  Other Relativity and Black Hole links

index | movies | approach | orbit | singularity | dive | Schwarzschild | wormhole | collapse | Hawking | quiz | home | links

[an error occurred while processing this directive] since 19 March 1997.

Updated 13 Nov 2011