popular science

spaghettification

Visualize this: You are in zero gravity, heading towards a nice little black hole. The theorized end of cosmos, in which not even light can escape it’s fatal destiny. At the next moment, tidal forces increase dramatically.

This means the gravity acting on your feet is much stronger than the gravity acting on your head. As a result, your feet begin to accelerate much faster than your head. Yikes.

Your body stretches out, not uncomfortably at first, but over time, the stretching will become more severe. Astronomers call this spaghettification because the intense gravitational field pulls you into a long, thin piece of spaghetti.

You’ll be a perfect human al dente pasta, sir.

Either way, spaghettification leads to a painful “that’s all folks”. When the tidal forces exceed the elastic limits of your body, you’ll snap into two parts at your weakest point, probably just above the hips.

In a matter of seconds, you’re a goner, reduced to a string of disconnected atoms that march into the black hole’s singularity like ants disappearing into a colony.

Nobody has ever seen a black hole, much less something going into one, but scientists are pretty sure they know what would happen if you fell in. As you got closer to the black hole, there would be a point of no return—that’s called the event horizon, the boundary that you can only escape if you travel faster than the speed of light. Theoretically, as you traveled further into the black hole, tidal forces would increase and make you stretch. If you were traveling feet first, you’d experience greater gravitational forces on your feet than on your head. As your feet accelerated faster than the top of your body, you would stretch and stretch. Of course, the human body isn’t made of rubber, so that stretching would have a limit. When the forces became too great, you’d just break in half—only to have the process begin again on each half.

According to Einstein, your spaghettified remains would stay trapped in the black hole, stretching and stretching until they were nothing but individual atoms. But not all scientists agree with this. In the 1970s, Stephen Hawking described in A Brief History of Time that black holes slowly evaporate, making everything inside of them disappear. And, if a person were to enter a black hole’s event horizon, the human body would be compressed into long, noodle-like shapes. So if you decided to end your life by jumping into a black hole, you’d more closely resemble an Italian feast rather than a fully formed person, but either way, you’d be dead as a dodo.
Space is a beautiful, terrifying cornucopia of life and death.
Stars are born; they supernova.
Black holes form; people get spaghettified.

It’s not a great way to die, but there’s one consolation: In space, no one can hear you scream.

 

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Here’s a quick, yet typical Monday question: Linguistically speaking, how would you like to die? I’ll wait. – Here’s the deal; we have more than *thousand* words, slang and euphemisms for death or a way to die (among my personal morbid formal English terms are Death by Misadventure, Promoted to Glory and probably something named Sunset). – Which tells a lot about humans’ obsession with death. But speaking about space beyond, astrophysicists have a strong theory of how you’d die if you somehow enter the black hole. – You’d be spaghetticized. *dun dun duuuuun* And it has nothing to do with carbs. 🧠 . . . . #popularscience #popscience #funfacts #spacefacts #blackhole #spaghettization #neuronenvogue

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