Falling into a 3-solar mass black hole-duration & distance

[Dean Brodi]

Suppose a traveller has slowly approached a 3-solar mass non-rotating black hole, & is now hovering near it at 3 times the Schwarzchild radius. He now commits suicide by switching his engines back on so that he begins to slowly drift towards the black hole. How many minutes of his time pass before he hits the singularity? How many kilometres in his reference frame will he have travelled? Or are black holes infinitely many kilometres deep?

[Schrödinger's hat]

Suppose a traveller has slowly approached a 3-solar mass non-rotating black hole, & is now hovering near it at 3 times the Schwarzchild radius. He now commits suicide by switching his engines back on so that he begins to slowly drift towards the black hole. How many minutes of his time pass before he hits the singularity? How many kilometres in his reference frame will he have travelled? Or are black holes infinitely many kilometres deep?

 

I think you meant off where I highlighted the on.

Moving ahead with that assumption:

How far and how long it takes depends on your reference frame.

 

According to our poor traveller, he hasn't moved at all, so no distance.

As for the time according to the traveller, or proper time, it wouldn't be very long. I don't understand GR well enough to tell you exactly how long, but it'd be roughly the same as falling into a star of similar mass.

[md65536]

Suppose a traveller has slowly approached a 3-solar mass non-rotating black hole, & is now hovering near it at 3 times the Schwarzchild radius. He now commits suicide by switching his engines back on so that he begins to slowly drift towards the black hole. How many minutes of his time pass before he hits the singularity? How many kilometres in his reference frame will he have travelled? Or are black holes infinitely many kilometres deep?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3a2HqtH4aiE

There's a clock on the bottom right of the video, but I'm not sure exactly what it means.

 

According to our poor traveller, he hasn't moved at all, so no distance.

As for the time according to the traveller, or proper time, it wouldn't be very long. I don't understand GR well enough to tell you exactly how long, but it'd be roughly the same as falling into a star of similar mass.

I don't think this is true, because space would appear to warp severely... so I think that the distance to the center of the black hole would change as you fell in???

 

 

 

Some thoughts:

According to the traveler, time (in local space) will tick at a normal rate.

However, with severe enough gravity (or is it gravitational gradient?), "local space" will become smaller and smaller, so that at some point your ship is not entirely in local "flat" space. Eventually your body won't be in local space, meaning that different parts of you will be experiencing time at different rates relative to other parts of you. You'd probably be dead anyway from tidal forces (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaghettification). But if you imagine it as a point observer, time would pass at a normal rate.

 

 

I don't think anyone knows what would happen inside a black hole especially regarding a theoretical singularity (like whether it can become "infinitely many kilometers deep" when approaching it or whatever) so I think any answer would be speculative.