Spaghettification, Hawking, and the intrepid astronaut

Spaghettification is the stretching into long thin strands of objects as they approach the black hole's singularity.

Stephen Hawking in A Brief History of Time used the illustration to describe an astronaut falling into a black hole's event horizon.

Such stretching is caused by extreme tidal forces of the black hole.

Surprisingly, it is the small black hole that causes spaghettification. A supermassive black hole will not:

'For a very large black hole such as those found at the center of galaxies, this point will lie well inside the event horizon, so the astronaut may cross the event horizon without noticing any squashing and pulling whatsoever (although it's only a matter of time, because once inside an event horizon, there is no getting out again). For small black holes whose Schwarzschild radius is much closer to the singularity, the tidal effects may become fatal long before the astronaut even reaches the event horizon.'

[Image by Cosmology Curiosity]

Related post: Hawking's astronaut, a black hole, & time dilation
Related post: Humphreys on Hawking's astronaut and time dilation

Technorati Tags: black hole, Brief History of Time, Einstein, event horizon, Schwarzschild radius, spaghettification, Stephen Hawking, supermassive black hole