Nearly everyone has heard of black holes, the universe’s largest consumer of everything, even light. Less well known is how they form, and what would happen if you dove into a black hole yourself.

Black holes are made when dying superstars collapse into a size so small, with so much mass, that the density is nearly infinite. When the collapse reaches this threshold, a black hole is born. Because of black holes’ incredible mass, their gravitational force is stronger than anything else ever been observed in the universe. It is so astronomical that nothing can escape the pull upon reaching a certain threshold known as the Schwarzchild radius, the theoretical “point of no return”. Nothing, not even light can break free from inside this radius. It is this characteristic which gives black holes their name – they emit no light for our eyes to perceive.

Now, before you decide to jump into a black hole in the name of science, there are a few theorems that must be mentioned and explained. As you, a being with a sense of time, move closer and closer to an object with nearly immeasurable mass, everything around you will seem to speed up; anyone watching you move towards this mass, would watch you move slower and slower. This is called time dilation, and comes from Einstein’s popular Special Relativity. In addition to that, as nothing can escape the gravitational pull of the black hole, it would be impossible for you to send any information back to your planet, or your spacecraft, so the experience you have will live and die along with you.

Finally, you take a leap of faith into the black hole. As you move closer and closer you see your legs and torso begin to stretch out in front of you as you become elongated; this is called spaghettification. At first, the black hole will be strictly in front of you, but as you move closer and closer into the black hole, it will start to envelope your vision until it is everywhere around you except a small little porthole that was the entrance to the black hole, looking back into the universe. As I mentioned before, time will begin to speed up from your point of view, first slowly, but to the point where every second for you is 10 billion years for the universe. In that way, you would actually see the end of the universe, and you would die along with it. Traveling into a black hole would not only be the end of you, but in a way the end of the entire universe. You would be the first, and most likely only, human to ever see the end of the universe. Just as the end comes and everything in the universe that was ever there would cease to exist, you would see it all, yet all alone.