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The Goddard Space Flight Center has used advanced computer modeling to show what happens as you fall towards a supermassive black hole. As you approach the black hole, you first notice the photon disk, particles of light in orbit, distorted, and stretched. Next, you fall further through rings of light and oblivion as you pass through the light that barely escaped the black hole, but you will not. You reach the event horizon, the great boundary between where things can escape and things cannot. However, the outside universe has one cruel trick left: as you fall further, the sky appears to recede, and it will do so forever, a trick of relativity as you approach light speed. You are still falling, and that’s all you’ll ever do. It’s often said that the event horizon is the boundary after which the gravity of the black hole is so strong that not even light can escape. That undersells the gravity of the situation. Down is down. Left and right are down. Up is also down. From now on, space itself flows inexorably towards the singularity and you are along for the ride. You have only microseconds left to live, but from your point of view, every waking moment is another life age of the universe. Past, present, and future all mingle around you. But your destination is fixed: the singularity, where gravity is infinite, and all of space-time is compressed to a single point. No one really knows what this place looks like. Maybe it’s the back of a bookcase.
