By Sofia Oural Martinez
Considering all of the universe, very few things have interested, confused, and charmed us quite like black holes. What happens once you fall in? How are they formed? Do they ever end? What even are they?
Scientists have theorized about the existence of black holes, the corpses of dead stars since the 18th century. However, it wasn’t until 1964 that astronomers found strong evidence of their existence. What they detected were X-rays coming from what we now call Cygnus X-1, a black hole in orbit around a regular star of the Milky Way. Although our understanding of black holes has greatly improved over the decades, we are still far from uncovering all their secrets. This is partially due to the fact that visible light does not
escape black holes, making them near impossible to see with a telescope. Instead, astronomers focus on how the matter around these them is warped and altered. The exact effect a black hole will have on an object depends on the hole’s mass. They range from miniature to supermassive, but the objects around them are drawn to them in the same way: they become unable to maintain a stable orbit. This peculiarity, where objects get too close and are suddenly absorbed (by lack of better word) by the black hole is due to the hole having its mass concentrated in a relatively small area. This means its density is much lower than other objects with similar or even lower mass, allowing for its gravitational pull to attract objects extremely close. Some black holes are surrounded by gas and dust which has flattened and swirl around in what is called an accretion disk. This matter is permanently falling closer to the point of no return, being pulled apart and stretched out. Occasionally, the falling matter continues swirling, which creates friction and can even cause light to escape in small rays. Sometimes the matter is redirected into “jets” of particles emitting gamma rays, which is what allows astrophysicists to find black holes. Once the object gets that close to a black hole, tidal forces will begin to act on it. Here on Earth, we know tidal forces as what affects the oceans’ high and low tides. But in a broader sense, tidal forces refer to the distortion of one object by another due to differences in their gravitational pull. As mentioned, the black hole’s incredibly high density allows it to have an incredibly high gravitational pull and therefore cause extreme tidal force that can even pull objects apart.
The tidal forces continue to affect the object as it draws closer, eventually reaching the infamous “point of no return”. This is the boundary after which nothing, not even light, can escape. As the object falls, the area closest to the hole’s center of mass will be (logically) more attracted to the center of gravity. This will cause the object to stretch out, in a process called spaghettification. The term came to be thanks to Stephen Hawking, who wrote about it in his book “A Brief History of Time”. He told the story of a space traveler who crossed the point of no return and became “stretched out like spaghetti”. Since then, spaghettification has been used by astrophysicists around the world to describe the effects black holes have on matter around them. But black holes don’t just stretch things out. They can also flatten them, like a pancake (yes, another food reference). Although it mostly happens in supermassive black holes, “pancake detonations” are a phenomenon through which stars who reach the point of no return are compressed by tidal forces. The newly formed “pancake” then explodes, releasing great amounts of thermonuclear energy. Beyond changes in shape, an object falling into a black hole would experience an alteration in the way time seems to pass. This is known as time dilation, where the closer the object gets to the hole, the slower time goes by. The reason behind this is the way the black hole alters the “fabric” of space and time given its strong gravitational field. On Earth this can be seen at a much smaller scale by the changes in the ticking pattern of watches on airplanes. Our object has now been stretched out in all kinds of shapes after withstanding incredible tidal forces, and after reaching the point of no return, appears to be frozen in time. What now?
All in all, matter near a black hole can be spaghettified, super-heated, squeezed, pancaked, pulled apart, and swirled around all while time itself stretches in unusual ways. But once that matter falls all the way past the event horizon into the black hole, we don’t yet know exactly what happens. That part of the story remains a mystery.
References and recommended reading:
“Black Holes.” Center for Astrophysics, Harvard & Smithsonian,
http://www.cfa.harvard.edu/research/topic/black-holes. Accessed Aug. 2024.
Bloomer, Ed. “What Happens If You Fall into a Black Hole?” Royal Museums Greenwich,
http://www.rmg.co.uk/stories/topics/what-happens-if-you-fall-black-
hole#:~:text=In%20astrophysics%2C%20spaghettification%20is%20the,to%20it%20as%20
it%20falls). Accessed Aug. 2024.
deGrasse Tyson, Neil. Death by Black Hole: And Other Cosmic Quandaries. W.W. Norton &
Company, 2014.
Gohd, Chelsea. “What Happens When Something Gets ‘too Close’ to a Black Hole?” NASA, NASA
Science, 3 May 2023, science.nasa.gov/universe/what-happens-when-something-gets-
too-close-to-a-black-hole/.
Hawking, Stephen. A Brief History of Time. Random House US, 1988.
Lincoln, Don. “‘Spaghettification’: How Black Holes Stretch Objects into Oblivion.” Big Think,
Space and Astrpphysics, 24 Jan. 2024, bigthink.com/hard-science/spaghettification-black-
holes/.
Astra Stem 
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