The other day while doing some light reading of Black Holes: The Reith Lectures by a new up and coming scientist named Stephen Hawking, I stumbled upon this piece of information and I quote: “There is a black hole with a mass of about four million times of that of the sun in the centre of our Milky Way galaxy.” Obviously, being the cool headed scientist that I am, I didn’t let the feeling of inevitable doom and extreme fear get to me… at least not right away. Instead, I stared at the book and after thirty minutes I started screaming around the house that we were all going to be sucked-up by a super massive black hole.
After I calmed down, I decided to get out of my blanket fort and research what would happen if you were to fall into a black hole. Surprisingly, it wasn’t that scary, you would simply turn into spaghetti. That’s right, SPAGHETTI! To get into the details of this transformation we first need to understand what a black hole is. A black hole is a bunch of matter squeezed into a tiny space. It is so dense that it has a massive amount of gravity that pulls everything to itself. It is so strong that not even light can escape. Black holes are formed when a big star, more than three times the size of our Sun, dies. The core of the star collapses upon itself creating a very dense “object” that will trap everything that falls into it.
Now, how exactly do we become spaghetti? Well, once you fall into a black hole your body goes through a process called spaghettification (duh), where your body is being stretched towards the center of the black hole while being compressed by the massive amount of gravity. Voila! That is how you create a bowl of you-Spaghetti! Fortunately, the supermassive black hole in the middle of our galaxy is not close enough to Earth to swallow us. Even if our sun were to die, it’s not big enough to create a black hole and Earth would just keep revolving around it.
Now the real question is, what would happen if spaghetti were to fall into a black hole? Would it become more spaghetticious?
By Karen Ventura
References
Freeman, Lucy. “What would happen if you fell into a black hole?” BBC Earth, https://www.bbcearth.com/news/what-would-happen-if-you-fell-into-a-black-hole. Accessed 29 December 2022.
Hawking, Stephen. Black Holes: The Reith Lectures. Transworld Publishers Limited, 2016.
Shu, Frank H. “Black hole | Definition, Formation, Types, Pictures, & Facts.” Britannica, 11 November 2022, https://www.britannica.com/science/black-hole. Accessed 29 December 2022.
“What Is a Black Hole?” NASA, 21 August 2018, https://www.nasa.gov/audience/forstudents/k-4/stories/nasa-knows/what-is-a-black-hole-k4.html. Accessed 29 December 2022.
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