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Death By Black Hole

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Not something most of us will experience and if you did, you won't get a chance to tell anyone. The escape velocity from earth is seven miles a second, if you threw a football that fast it would travel to the end of the universe, eventually, unless the intergalactic Enviro-Enforcers deem it space pollution and zap it with clean energy. The escape velocity from a black hole is so fast even light can't escape it.

If you should fall into a black hole, you're not coming out and forget blogging about it. You will die long before you fall all the way in. What happens is that the gravity at your feet is so much more powerful because it is closer to the center of the black hole. So now your feet are falling faster than your head. That's a really bad situation. At first it might feel like a really great stretch, like cosmic yoga, but due to gravitational tides your body will break into two parts, most likely at the base of your spine. At this stage you won't be dead yet, because all your essential organs will  be intact.

This is where you know you are in trouble and all the whining in the universe won't save you. From there you break up into four parts, eight parts etc. Essentially your body is bifurcating it's way into the blackhole.  Your body breaks down to a single string of molecules being pulled down into the abyss. This is known as spaghettification.

Humans have a lot of words on how to die, if someone kills you or you kill yourself, then there's a word for death by electricity etc. Now you can add spaghettification to that.

With thanks to Neil Degrasse Tyson,
Director of New York's Hayden Planetarium
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