Spaghettification

With a recent picture of a blackhole becoming the newest internet sensation I thought it might be neat to talk about my favorite word, spaghettification.

In class we’ve talked about tidal forces, that is the force differential between the close part and the far part to a gravitational source. On the small scale, such as Earth and its moon, it causes tides and the Moon tidally locked orbit. For those moons who have found themselves inside the Roche limit, these tidal forces can start to rip the moon apart and cause them to sucked into the planet. When the mass exerting the gravitational force becomes so large though the tidal forces start to get exaggerated.

space man getting spaghettified

This is where spaghettification comes in. If we look at the equation for gravitational force, F=(GMm/r^2) it shows that the radius term grows much faster than the mass terms meaning that as things get closer the force of gravity ramps up pretty fast. If we were to say that a value was twice as big as another, for numbers like 1 or 2 the difference would be small between the numbers, but for larger numbers the difference between some integer factor of these numbers is much larger. So if we consider the incomprehensible size of a black hole the difference between a front of an object and the back of an object will have extreme tidal forces. These extreme tidal forces act similar to the Roche limit as far as ripping apart the object but much more interestingly. Since the tidal forces are so extreme, on an atom by atom bases one atom will be accelerating much faster than its neighbor. This causes the atoms to travel towards the black hole in a single file line one after another much akin to spaghetti noodles; therefore, this process is known as spaghettification.