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The new version of the software is superior to the old one. about black holes they’re often described as if they’re completely static but in reality most black holes spin and this can have a huge effect on the gravitational gradient near the Event Horizon the faster the spin the more flattened the black hole is and the flatter the black hole is the more spread out the gravitational gradient is and the weaker it is at any given distance so if the black hole is spinning fast enough you could conceivably survive your fall past the Event Horizon and not get spaghettified
We are all allowed to have our own favorite space words, but mine has to be spaghettification. Okay, it’s not a 100% official astronomical term, but it’s such a great - if potentially gruesome - visual; why would we need anything else? Spaghettification describes what might happen to you during your hypothetical decent toward a black hole: you’re ripped apart into a noodly stream of subatomic particles, and it’s sometimes treated as an inevitability. But because there’s still a lot we don’t know about black holes, astronomers have proposed ways you could possibly avoid a spaghettified fate.
How does a human body - or any clump of matter - get turned into a noodle? It all comes down to what’s called a gravitational gradient; how the strength of gravity varies with distance from a massive body. Basically, the closer a bit of matter gets to another bit of matter, the stronger the force of gravity - but it’s not a one-to-one relationship. If you cut the distance in half, you multiply the strength of gravity by four.
So imagine you’re an astronaut chillaxing near a black hole with your little astronaut booty pointed toward the Event Horizon - the infamous point of no return, where gravity is so strong you inevitably spiral down into the singularity at the heart of that black hole. Your feet will feel a slightly stronger pull than your head. Far enough away from the Event Horizon, the difference isn’t particularly noteworthy, but as you drift closer and closer, it gets larger and larger. Eventually, the gravitational gradient is so large it overpowers the strength of the tissues holding your body together - skin, muscles, bones, and so on - so as you continue your fall, you get ripped into ever smaller pieces, which form a nice little noodly line as they all funnel downward.
But how close to the black hole does this spaghettification happen? It all comes down to the black hole’s mass - but maybe not in the way you’re thinking. For black holes with masses around that of our sun, you’d become spaghetti before your booties got anywhere near the Event Horizon. But the more mass of the black hole, the larger the Event Horizon, and the weaker the gravitational gradient. It seems counter-intuitive, but it’s a natural consequence of Einstein reconceptualizing gravity itself and his theory of general relativity. Gravity isn’t so much a pull as it is falling along curves in the fabric of space-time. The more mass of a black hole is, the shallower those curves are at its much larger Event Horizon. So, in the regions just beyond that point of no return, gravity’s strength changes more slowly. For a bigger black hole, you need to get closer to the Event Horizon for the full spaghettification effect, but for supermassive black holes - black holes that are millions, if not billions, of times the mass of a single star - the extreme forces you need to tear your body asunder happen well inside the Event Horizon.
So if you slip past the Event Horizon of a supermassive black hole, all is not lost. You’ll never see your friends or family again, but you might not be spaghettified, because while physicists have plenty of models for what happens inside an Event Horizon, no one knows what will happen and the math often creates paradoxes. And trying to solve some of these problems, like not knowing whether or not information is destroyed when it passes through the Event Horizon, theoretical physicists have proposed some pretty extreme ideas.
For example, back in 2012, one team suggested that any matter that reaches the Event Horizon of a black hole would be almost immediately incinerated by a quote-unquote “firewall” of radiation created as the black hole evaporates. While the idea of a black hole wall of fire is controversial, according to that worldview, you would escape the fate of spaghettification if you were falling into a supermassive black hole. You’re still dead, of course, so it’s not a happy ending, but what if there were one? To avoid death, you would first hope that the black hole you’ve fallen into is spinning.
When pop science talks about black holes, they’re often described as if they’re completely static, but in reality, most black holes spin, and this can have a huge effect on