He defines new terms well and provides many examples. "When an unlucky star wanders too close to a supermassive black hole in the center of a galaxy, the extreme gravitational pull of the black hole shreds the star into thin streams of material," said co-author Thomas Wevers, an ESO Fellow in Santiago, Chile. Law succeeds in providing the public with an accessible tool to defend against intellectual black holes. This illustration depicts a star (in the foreground) experiencing spaghettification as it's sucked in by a supermassive black hole (in the background) during a tidal disruption event. The event releases a bright burst of energy that can be detected by astronomers. The other half was simultaneously ejected outward into space.ĭuring this violent spaghettification process, long, thin strands of material that make up the star collapse into the intense gravity of a black hole - which basically swallows it up like stellar spaghetti. They said that the star had approximately the same mass as the sun, about half of which was lost to the black hole, which is over a million times bigger. And light travels at 186,000 miles… per second.Using telescopes from the European Southern Observatory (ESO), scientists were able to investigate in unprecedented detail just what happens when a star is devoured by a "monster" black hole. Inside a black hole’s event horizon, gravity is so strong that even light can’t escape. Souitat did the math, and says that if you were 1 million miles away from Sagittarius A, you’d need to be traveling at 596,192 miles per hour to reach the escape velocity and avoid spaghettification.īut if you get too close, it doesn’t matter how fast you’re going - there’s no avoiding getting sucked in. For example, the International Space Station has to be moving at about 17,500 miles per hour in order to get a stable orbit around the planet. The same principle applies to rockets and satellites in orbit around Earth. The only way to get near a black hole without being spaghettified is to fly by really, really fast - in other words, to reach its escape velocity. So you start being elongated and stretched out … until you become part of the black hole.” “Just the difference in gravity between your feet and your chest is so huge. Objects that get sucked into black holes are stretched in the direction of the hole while simultaneously compressed as the atoms are pulled in at different rates and directions. “We’re talking about forces that our human brain cannot even understand,” says Naoufal Souitat, a space engineer with the Southwest Research Institute.īlack holes are so strong, Souitat says, “they would pull you apart millions of miles before you even get close to them… You’re going to get spaghettified.” That means its gravitational pull is about 3 million times stronger than Earth’s gravitational force. It’s only a mere 30 times wider than our sun, but its mass is 4 million times bigger. Take, for example, the closest black hole to us in the Milky Way: Sagittarius A. d = distance between the centers of the two objectsĪs the equation shows, the more mass an object has, the stronger its gravitational pull.G = universal gravitational constant, or 6.673 x 10-11 Nm2/kg2.Here’s the equation to calculate the force on an object, which accounts for the masses of both objects, and the distance between them: If you’re planning your next rendezvous to the periphery of a black hole (which we strongly advise against) you’ll have to first calculate how strong its gravitational pull is. We also accept questions sent to Twitter or Instagram. You can record it as a voice memo on your smartphone and send it to or leave a voicemail on our hotline, 1-844-GO-OTTER. Submit your question about the natural world to the Outside/In team. This week, Gilman in Tucson, Arizona asked, “How close can you get to a black hole before you get pulled in by its gravity?” Every other Friday on Morning Edition, the Outside/In team answers a question from a listener about the natural world.
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