Image of a black hole closer to Earth
Imagine yourself on a Sunday at noon, gathering with your loved ones to spend the day, and your grandmother cooks spaghetti with sauce for the main course.
Everyone at the table knows that as soon as the pot touches the table, there won't be a single noodle left alive. When you start twisting the noodles on your fork, you realize they are incredibly long, and no matter how upset an Italian might get, you'll have to cut them to eat. It's a face-off between your mouth and the length of the noodles.
Now, take that same image to a cosmic scale. Imagine that instead of you and your fork, what's facing the infinite stretching is an entire star. And instead of your mouth waiting for a bite, waiting for it is a black hole, with an appetite that would make your grandmother blush on a Sunday.
Gravity starts pulling harder on one side than the other, as if the ends of the star were two different noodles. The result: the star stretches, twists, and breaks until it becomes a true cosmic spaghetti.
This process has a name: spaghettification. And although it sounds funny, it is one of the most extreme and violent phenomena we know of in the universe.
A black hole is a point of high density in the Universe, generated as a result of the explosion of a star in a supernova during its last stages of life. The gravitational force it generates is so powerful that practically no object that enters it can leave, not even light. Astronomers call this gravity "tidal forces", and it is precisely these spatial tides that turn stars that pass close to black holes into threads of matter, illuminating the universe with flashes so bright that they sometimes outshine entire galaxies.
Could Earth fall into a black hole?
Black holes are real and exist in our galaxy, but the closest one is about 1,600 light years away. That means we would need to travel a distance impossible even for light over several human lifetimes to reach it.
Additionally, the Milky Way has a supermassive black hole at its center (Sagittarius A), but it is 25,000 light years from Earth. Too far away to affect us.
*Image of Sagittarius A taken by the Event Horizon Telescope.
The gravity of a black hole is dangerous only if you get very close to it. If the Sun were suddenly replaced by a black hole of the same mass, Earth would continue to orbit as it does: we wouldn't be flung out or fall in. The big difference would be that we would be left without light or heat.
Spaghettification shows us that the universe can be as poetic as it is imposing, and if we focus on it from a scientific point of view, it is a window that allows us to study those hidden giants that inhabit galaxies.
So, the next time you are facing a plate of spaghetti on a Sunday, think that out there, in some corner of the cosmos, an entire star might be having its last lunch.
By Sol Aebi, Biotechnology student at UADE
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