To space-gazing Earthlings, our solar system appears to be surrounded by billions of stars in the Milky Way. But if we look further, can we find evidence that we are inside something more fantastic like a black hole?

Black holes are places where gravity in the universe is strong enough to distort time and space around it; Once inside, nothing, not even light, can escape.

“According to one scenario, a black hole may have swallowed the Earth long ago. “But if it did, the gravitational pull would be catastrophic,” said Gaurav Khanna, a black hole physicist at the University of Rhode Island.

“Time slowed down as Earth approached the black hole. And depending on the size of the black hole, matter can stretch into spaghetti-like shapes.

“Even if the planet survives this spaghettification, Earth will still be attached to a dense, tiny singularity where it will be scorched by the pressure and heat of unimaginable gravity.”

Thus, we can rule out the possibility that a black hole may have swallowed the Earth at some point in its history; everything would be gone in a second.

But there’s another way Earth is at the core of a black hole: it may have formed there.

“A black hole, on the contrary, is very similar to the Big Bang… The math looks similar,” Khanna said. While a black hole collapsed into a tiny high-density point, the Big Bang exploded from such a point.

One theory argues that the Big Bang was originally a black hole singularity in a larger parent universe. Khanna said the dense center continued to contract “until it somehow faded out and a baby universe formed inside the black hole.”

Known as Schwarzschild cosmology, this theory proposes that our universe is expanding inside a black hole that is now part of the main universe. “Theoretically, this scenario means that universes can exist within universes, and traveling back through a black hole – a possibly impossible feat since even light cannot go back – would open up unknown realms.”

However, this theory is unlikely to be proven; nothing can return from the event horizon of a black hole.

But if Earth is inside a black hole, experts have an accurate estimate of the size of the cosmic abyss.

“If we’re inside a black hole, it must be huge,” said Scott Field, a professor of mathematics at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth.

“Earth isn’t just hidden inside a planet-sized black hole or even in the solar system. If that were the case, scientists would have noticed,” Field said. Signs of the black hole’s spin will be visible. Or we’ll see subtle distortions caused by extreme gravity, such as time slowing down and matter stretching as humans pass through the black hole.

“For example, if Earth were inside an Earth-sized black hole, people would notice the effects of tidal forces, such as spaghettiization and slowing of time, as they travel from one point of the world to another,” Field said. Working on simulations.

“So a black hole like this is the size of the universe, and it must be so large that we can’t travel far enough or fast enough to detect gravitational perturbations,” Field said. Said.

Being in a black hole universe, Earthlings “would have no way of knowing there is another main universe,” Khanna said. We wouldn’t notice it.