Jan 73 min read

Spaghettification: The Cosmic Pasta Maker

Author: Bryan Lin

Editors: Suri Liu, Hwi-on Lee

Artist: Angela Ke

Could you imagine being stretched into an infinitely long strand of cosmic spaghetti? Although this sounds like science fiction, Spaghettification is an actual phenomenon that occurs in objects too close to a black hole. Initially coined by famous physicist Stephen Hawking, Spaghettification demonstrates one of the most extreme and fascinating effects of gravity in our universe. But what causes Spaghettification?

Spaghettification is a phenomenon that occurs because of how black holes pull on things, but not in the way that you would imagine. When a person pulls on a piece of string, the string stays the same size, but the force generated by the pulling motion causes the string to move toward you. This, however, is not the case with black holes. If the same piece of string were held vertically near a black hole, the bottom of the string would have a stronger force pulling on it than the top. In this case, the string wouldn’t just fall but stretch longer and longer. The same thing would happen with anything that gets too close, whether a person or a whole planet! This pulling effect is called Tidal Force, defined as the distortion of one object by another due to the difference in the gravitational pull on each end of the object. It is very similar to the tidal forces that affect our oceans here on Earth. This process usually becomes (irreversible/inevitable/inescapable) once you cross the event horizon, the black hole’s notorious point of no return.

The scale at which Spaghettification occurs varies depending on the black hole's size and density. In this case, smaller black holes pose a more extreme and immediate threat as they cause instant and violent stretching due to their stronger tidal forces. Still, it is possible to cross the event horizon of a larger black hole while remaining unchanged due to a less extreme gravitational gradient that comes with their large size. The density of the black hole is what makes it unique, as no other massive object in the known universe concentrates enormous amounts of mass into an incredibly small space. This concentration creates gravitational forces so strong that NASA even believes that black holes “curve and stretch the fabric of space-time” and that “ time passes slower closer to the black hole than further away.”

Now, you may ask yourself, how do we know that phenomenon occurs if no human has ever been close to a black hole? While it is true that no human has gotten close enough to a black hole to witness or even experience Spaghettification, by observing the stars present near black holes, we can understand its effects on other matter. Initially described in Stephen Hawking’s book “A Brief History of Time,” the first direct evidence of Spaghettication came in 2019 when astronomers at the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope and New Technology Telescope witnessed the remnants of a Spaghettification event. The ash of light that had been produced by the phenomenon, dubbed AT2019qiz, revealed, according to Astronomer Edo Berger at the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, a “star [being] torn apart with about half of its mass feeding–or accreting–into a black hole of 1 million times the mass of the sun, and the other half [being] ejected outward.” Through AT2019qiz, astronomers discovered that the mass ejected outwards blocked the bright light produced when a star was spaghettified, making the phenomenon incredibly difficult to study. But by observing the event in its initial stages, the astronomers finally managed to witness Spaghettification, which, according to Kate Alexander, a NASA Einstein Fellow at Northwestern University, “provided the first opportunity to pinpoint the origin of the obscuring material and follow in real-time how it engulfs the black hole.”

Spaghettification, the mind-bending phenomenon caused by the extreme gravitational pull of black holes, stretches and distorts objects beyond recognition. This fascinating event has been observed and studied through astronomical events like AT2019qiz, providing insight into the behavior of black holes. While the concept of Spaghettification may sound supernatural, its existence has been confirmed through scientific observation, shedding light on the mysterious nature of our universe.

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