Sitting around thinking about how exactly one would be killed by a black hole may sound morbid, but it’s actually a pretty important determination for physicists.
Sitting around thinking about how exactly one would be killed by a black hole may sound morbid, but it’s actually a pretty important determination for physicists.
While all of them agree that after encountering one death is imminent, how one’s demise would specifically come about is a point of contention.
It’s important, because knowing that could either confirm or change everything about the workings of nature.
The prevailing theory has the cute name, but an awful outcome.
It’s called spaghettification and says that once the threshold of the black hole is reached, the pull would become stronger on one end of an object than the other.
What would result is a spaghetti-like stretching, and eventually object would break apart and get sucked inside.
The other big idea calls for an end by incineration. Whatever floats too close, gets burned up and dissipates. It doesn’t get sucked in, because there is no ‘in’. The end of the universe has been reached.
Well, that’s problematic because it calls into question Einstein’s theory of general relativity and the concept of space-time itself.
While neither has been declared the winner, one thing is clear – stay away from black holes.
