Chapter 1: Introduction to the Concept

Recently, a curious reader posed an intriguing question:

"What would we observe if we were to send a probe equipped with a camera towards a black hole while maintaining a safe distance to receive real-time video feeds?"

This thought experiment allows us to delve into the fascinating physics of black holes.

As the camera nears the black hole, the gravitational pull intensifies, leading to a significant slowdown in time for the camera's spacecraft. This phenomenon has been dramatized in films like Interstellar.

As the camera approaches, an intriguing effect unfolds: if the camera typically transmits at 25 frames per second, the rate of frames received will progressively decrease. This is due to gravitational redshift, where the wavelength of the signal expands as it gets nearer to the black hole. Consequently, although an observer onboard would perceive the camera transmitting at its usual rate, time would seem to stretch, making one second feel longer due to gravitational time dilation. For someone observing from a distance, time would appear to flow much faster, resulting in a reduction of frames received and eventually leading to intervals between frames expanding to hours, days, years, centuries, and even millennia.

To capture the long-wave signals effectively, specialized equipment would be necessary to mitigate interference caused by matter falling into the black hole. While these technical challenges exist, they are surmountable with the right technology and signal encoding methods.

The final images relayed by the camera would depend on the mass of the black hole it is approaching. If the camera were to fall into a stellar-mass black hole, typically ranging from 5 to several tens of solar masses, the varying gravitational forces would likely tear the spacecraft apart long before it got close. This is due to the gravitational field's non-uniformity, which becomes more pronounced as one approaches the black hole, resulting in destructive tidal forces acting on the spacecraft.

In this scenario, all that would be captured in the footage would be the accretion disk—a swirling mass of heated matter encircling the black hole—alongside a dark sphere in the center, representing the event horizon.

In contrast, a camera falling towards a supermassive black hole would witness a more remarkable scene. Surprisingly, the gravitational field around supermassive black holes is more uniform, allowing the spacecraft to potentially reach the event horizon intact.

As the camera descends into the black hole's gravitational well, its field of view narrows until all external light converges into a minuscule blue dot. Once it crosses the event horizon, even that dot vanishes, plunging into darkness. Although the camera would continue to record, the signals would never reach us, and the wait for the camera to cross the event horizon could span billions of years.

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