What happens to time and space inside a black hole?

Black holes are an enigma that even the brightest minds on our planet find perplexing.

According to NASA’s explanation, black holes are formed when a massive star, roughly 20 times the size of our Sun, exhausts its energy and collapses under the force of gravity. At this point, a supernova, one of the brightest explosions in the universe, is triggered.

In a study from 2022, it was estimated that there are about 40 billion observable black holes in the universe. These black holes vary in mass, from three to tens of times the mass of our Sun, known as stellar-mass black holes. Others, known as supermassive black holes, can have masses ranging from 100,000 to billions of times that of our Sun. Supermassive black holes are often found at the centers of most large galaxies.

Black holes always contain the universe’s most profound mysteries, which humanity has yet to explore fully.

Albert Einstein, a master of spacetime, predicted the existence of black holes in the early 1900s. The mathematics and physics of Einstein’s theory of general relativity demonstrated that black holes should exist. However, even Laurette in 1921 doubted the existence of these strange entities.

To this day, NASA and the world’s brightest minds remain puzzled by black holes. Some black holes are extremely ancient, forming in the early universe. The time and space within black holes are among the phenomena that continue to baffle scientists.

Space and time change positions inside a black hole.

As explained by Einstein online, once the event horizon is crossed inside a black hole, everything becomes profoundly peculiar as space and time shift and stretch infinitely. This is one of the most challenging concepts to grasp.

First, it’s important to understand that the gravitational force of a black hole is incredibly strong, to the point that once something enters its reach, it cannot escape its gravitational pull, even light. In space, objects are always in motion, moving through both space and time, constrained by Newton’s law of inertia. The law dictates that an object will continue to move until something stops it. But what happens when an object, say, a star in motion, is pulled by a black hole? When does the star stop moving?

When this star, previously moving freely through space and time, crosses the event horizon, something significant occurs: its laws of motion in space and time change. Now, the star can only move towards the “center” or the bizarre point of the black hole; it cannot escape.

But what happens when the star reaches this bizarre point? Does it stop moving? One explanation suggests that the star continues to move infinitely, within a plane where space and time change positions, and space stretches out infinitely. This is why black holes can “swallow up” massive objects, making them fit within a small region inside the black hole.