This effect essentially stretches out the object more and more as the object gets closer to the black hole, creating a long, thin shape. The difference in gravitational pull isn’t unique to black holes, but their extreme density creates an extreme effect. This difference in gravitational pull increases as the object gets closer to the event horizon. For any object falling into a black hole, the part closer to the black hole will feel a stronger gravitational pull than the part farther away from the black hole. The effects of a black hole continue to escalate as an object approaches a black hole's event horizon: This is the point of no return, or the boundary surrounding a black hole beyond which nothing, not even light, can escape. Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Taeho Ryu (MPA) Yellow represents the greatest densities, blue the least dense. These simulations show that destruction and survival depend on the stars’ initial densities. Others manage to withstand their close encounters. The black hole rips some stars apart into a stream of gas, a phenomenon called a tidal disruption event. Watch eight model stars stretch and deform as they approach a virtual black hole 1 million times the mass of the Sun. Due to a black hole’s extreme density, objects in its vicinity will experience extreme gravity and hence extreme tidal forces that can even pull the object apart. So, tidal forces refer to the distortion of one object by another due to the difference in the gravitational pull on the near and far side of an object. Here on Earth, the ocean has high and low tides which are caused by the Moon's gravitational pull tugging on Earth and its water. When an object gets “too close,” it will start to experience tidal forces. Black holes are extremely massive, but that mass is concentrated in a smaller area, creating a high density that increases the maximum force of a black hole’s gravity by allowing objects to get very close to all of that mass. While there are objects just as massive as some black holes, they don’t have the same density. What sets black holes and their gravitational power apart is their extreme density. While a black hole’s gravity isn’t strange on its own, things change when an object gets too close, which generally means close enough that it can no longer maintain a stable orbit around the massive object. The exact effects of a black hole depend on its mass, which can vary dramatically as black holes range from miniature to supermassive, or anywhere from tens to billions of times our Sun’s mass. Whether it's gas, dust, planets, stars, or a hypothetical wayward space traveler, black holes are powerful enough to capture anything that veers too close. Spaghettification and the "Point of No Return" One question that continues to intrigue scientists and science enthusiasts alike is: What actually happens when something gets too close to a black hole? Or, even though there are no black holes within human reach, what would happen if one of us got a little too close to a black hole? Instead, astronomers primarily look for the ways that black holes influence and distort matter around them. This is, in part, because light can't escape from a black hole, so they cannot be observed directly with telescopes. While scientists have dramatically improved our understanding of black holes since that first detection, these objects remain quite mysterious. Now astronomers have a growing understanding of these strange gravitational powerhouses that form from the collapsed cores of dying stars. Observatories detected X-rays coming from Cygnus X-1, which we now know is a black hole in orbit around a regular star in our own Milky Way galaxy. However, it wasn’t until 1964 that astronomers found strong evidence of a black hole for the first time. Scientists have theorized about the existence of black holes since the 18th century. Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Jeremy Schnittman The black hole’s extreme gravity alters the paths of light coming from different parts of the disk, producing the warped image where we see the disk behind the black hole as if it is simultaneously on the top and the bottom of the black hole. Seen nearly edgewise, the turbulent disk of gas churning around a black hole takes on a bizarre double-humped appearance.
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