Imagine a Sunday at home at noon, gathering with your loved ones to spend the day while your grandmother cooks spaghetti with sauce as the main dish.
Everyone at the table knows that once the pot touches the table, there won't be a single noodle left. When you start twirling the spaghetti on the fork, you realize they are extremely long and, even if an Italian gets upset, you'll have to cut them in order to eat. It's a face-to-face battle 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 faces the infinite stretch is an entire star. And instead of your mouth waiting for a bite, what awaits it is a black hole, with an appetite that would make your grandmother blush on a Sunday.
Gravity starts pulling more strongly from 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.
That process has a name: spaghettification. And although it sounds funny, it is one of the most extreme and violent phenomena we know in the universe.
A black hole is a point of high density in the universe, formed as a result of the explosion of a star in a supernova in the final stages of its life. The gravitational force it exerts is so powerful that practically no object that enters it can escape, not even light. Astronomers call this gravity "tidal forces", and it is precisely these spatial tides that turn stars passing near black holes into threads of matter, illuminating the universe with flashes so bright that they sometimes outshine an entire galaxy.
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 an impossible distance even for light in 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 for it to affect us.
The gravity of a black hole is dangerous only if you get extremely close to it. If the Sun were suddenly replaced by a black hole of the same mass, the Earth would continue to orbit as usual: we wouldn’t be flung away 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 view it from a scientific perspective, it's a window that allows us to study those hidden giants inhabiting galaxies.
So the next time you're faced with a plate of spaghetti on Sunday, think that out there, in some corner of the cosmos, an entire star might be having its last meal.
By Sol Aebi, Biotechnology student at UADE
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