Black hole shock: Human body would be ‘turned to spaghetti’ if swallowed by black hole

One expert has warned against getting too close to a black hole as you would literally be torn apart by the immense gravitational pull. A black hole’s gravitational pull is so strong that not even light can escape from them. So, if a person in a spacesuit were travelling foot first towards a black hole, they would be torn and stretched apart.

This is due to a process called “spaghettification”. The immense gravitational pull is so strong that the force is much stronger at the base than the top.

For example, if you were travelling feet first into a black hole, the gravity be so strong you would literally be ‘spaghettified’, and you would be stretched out to a point where you would just be a stream of atoms heading towards the centre.

Professor Richard Massey, a Royal Society research fellow at the Institute for Computational Cosmology at Durham University, told Live Science: “Falling through an event horizon is literally passing beyond the veil — once someone falls past it, nobody could ever send a message back.

“They’d be ripped to pieces by the enormous gravity, so I doubt anyone falling through would get anywhere.”

However, it is unlikely you would even realise you were being spaghettified.

Kevin Pimbblet, a senior lecturer in physics at the University of Hull, has said: “We might not even notice if a truly supermassive black hole swallowed us below its event horizon as everything would appear as it once was, at least for a small period of time.

“In this case, it could be some time before disaster struck.

“But don’t lose too much sleep, we’d have to be unfortunate to ‘hit’ a black hole in the first place.”

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Scientists believe the most common instance is when a star, thousands of times the size of our sun, collapses in on itself when it dies – known as a supernova.

Another way is when a large amount of matter, which can be in the form of a gas cloud or a star collapses in on itself through its own gravitational pull.

Finally, the collision of two neutron stars can cause a black hole.

The gist of all three ways is that a massive amount of mass located in one spot can cause a black hole.

source: express.co.uk