That's Got to Hurt
Let’s say you wanted to see a black hole up close but then you got too near and fell in. That sucks. Just what will happen to your body as you dive into the abyss?
Until recently, all that researchers knew was that the difference in gravity between your head and your feet would stretch you out like a noodle.
New simulations from theoretical physicist Kip Thorne and his colleagues show the actual experience would be even more agonizing and bizarre. Around a black hole, the formulas that govern space-time break up into two separate components.
One part, the vortex lines, twists space-time clockwise or counterclockwise, putting your body through the wringer. The other components, known as tendex lines, stretch and squeeze the curvature of space-time. An astronaut falling toward the equator of a black hole would get pulled apart like taffy while one going to the polar region would get flattened like a pancake.
These effects were so new that Thorne’s team had to come up with a new term to describe them. While vortex -- coming from the Latin word vortere, ‘to turn,’ -- already exists, Thorne’s graduate student, David Nichols, coined the word tendex, which comes from the Latin tendere, ‘to stretch.’