IS IT POSSIBLE TO LIVE NEAR A BLACK HOLE?

If you have seen the renowned film "Interstellar", you probably remember the  protagonists leaving the earth in search for an inhabitable planet near a super massive black hole, but you must know there’s a major mistake in all that.  

 A  research directed by NASA astrophysicist, Jeremy Schnittman,  explains it. In his work Schinttman analyses the probability to find an inhabitable planet at  the right distance from the black hole, in the livable area , heated by the accretion disk . Would you like to know what the mistake in the movie is? You can’t live near a black hole because of the light. What does that mean? The light  I refer to is the light that comes from the surrounding stars . To understand it,  we have to imagine the  gravitational , and in general physical  effects caused by this massive object. First of all the different passing of time. According to Einstein's  relativity , when you are close to an object with a huge mass, the time flows faster . Few hours near the black hole are many years in interstellar space. The second one is the reason why you are reading this article ....  charged particles accelerated by the gravity.

We are continuously bombarded by charged particles from the space but the atmosphere protects us, just like a shield, when they enter the atmosphere, they impact other particles that impact other particles  and so on , just like a billiard match.

But how strong are they ? We have to know that those particles or radiations have a definite wave length , the smaller it is , the stronger the radiations are; such as gamma rays that have a wave length of 1 pm or less (0,000000000001 m). This kind of radiation can destroy molecules that compose our cells causing also death .

The irony is that there are particles much stronger than those, which created by catastrophic events,  like supernovae  or  neutron stars  or black hole collisions . In this case you have in a proton, with the diameter of 10^-15, the energy of a tennis ball launched at 100 km/h . But don't worry they are extremely rare, the stronger they are the rarer is the probability to encounter them .

As we can see in the graphic above,  the probabilities to encounter those particles decreases with the increase of the energy,  but staying on a planet near a black hole the probabilities to encounter this particles soar. Furthermore,  there wouldn't be any atmosphere to protect you because it would have been destroyed by our nice radiations : )

So these were the reasons why you shouldn't live near a black hole. Don’t trust films, because they are fiction and they can’t be reliable as for science or history.

But,  if you really want to live near a black hole,  I won’t stop you.  Jokes apart, thanks for reading so far and … see you next time!

Giordano C.