Spaghettification anyone?

Do you know what spaghettification is?


Say a person gets close to a black hole.  First the legs of the person gets pulled and stretched like a chewing gum when it's pulled.  Then the person starts to look like a long spaghetti noodle as the body  gets closer and closer!!  This is called spaghettification.

Now you can imagine other things like stars and rocket ships getting closer to a black hole and may be draw a few.  Here's one I drew about a person and a star too close to a black hole.  Of course they are not to size really.





- Sharko




What happens here?

Lets define what a black hole in the simplest words.  When a big, I mean really big star (much much bigger than our Sun) runs out of fuel, it shrinks and shrinks in size.  It might even become smaller than the size of an atom but keeps the same mass.  This is called a black hole.  Even light cannot escape a black hole.

When that much mass resides in such a small space, (very very dense right), the gravity still is high and anything that comes close to its boundary (also called Event horizon), it sucks it in and gobbles it up.  Eventually the black hole might increase in size as it gobbles up stars and galaxies.  The more mass it gobbles up, the more gravitational pull it will have. 

So, when a person gets close to a black hole, the gravitational pull is more at the legs than the head and so the legs gets stretched/pulled towards the black hole.  Eventually the whole body gets stretched to make it look like a long noodle and so got its name "Spaghettification".  Atleast who ever named it came up with a fun name right...

-Sheela