As you get closer to a black hole, the flow of time slows down, compared to flow of time far from the hole. (According to Einstein’s theory, any massive body, including the Earth, produces this effect. Near a black hole, the slowing of time is extreme.

Although their gravity is stronger, the stretching force is weaker than it would be with a small black hole and it would not kill you. The bad news is that the event horizon marks the edge of the abyss. Nothing can escape from inside the event horizon, so you could not escape or report on your experience.

The Short Answer: Although humans can’t hop into a time machine and go back in time, we do know that clocks on airplanes and satellites travel at a different speed than those on Earth. We all travel in time!

If black holes evaporate via Hawking radiation, a solar mass black hole will evaporate (beginning once the temperature of the cosmic microwave background drops below that of the black hole) over a period of 1064 years. Even these would evaporate over a timescale of up to 10106 years.

By their calculations, quantum mechanics could feasibly turn the event horizon into a giant wall of fire and anything coming into contact would burn in an instant. In that sense, black holes lead nowhere because nothing could ever get inside. This, however, violates Einstein’s general theory of relativity.

It’s pitch black — you can’t see it, because it lies in your future, and just like your future you don’t know what it looks like until you get there. But instead of appearing as a tiny point, the huge gravitational differences stretch that point to engulf most of your vision.

The event horizon is the dark region from which no light can escape. As you began to get close, you’d feel something strange: a force pulling on your body. Only, a black hole is much, much stronger, and its tidal forces would stretch and compress you extremely severely the closer you got.

And in general relativity, strong enough centrifugal forces act like antigravity: they push, not pull. This creates a boundary inside the black hole, called the inner horizon. Outside this region, radiation is falling inward towards the singularity, compelled by the extreme gravitational pull.

A black hole is an astronomical object with a gravitational pull so strong that nothing, not even light, can escape it. A stellar-mass black hole forms when a star with more than 20 solar masses exhausts the nuclear fuel in its core and collapses under its own weight.

You can ‘see’ the closest known black hole to Earth with the naked eye. There is a black hole in our backyard. Astronomers have found the closest black hole yet at just 1000 light years from Earth, close enough to see the stars that orbit it without a telescope.