What Would Happen If You Fell Into A Black Hole?

First off, know that falling into a black hole would be a one-way ride and not a pretty one. According to Charles Liu (via LiveScience), an astrophysicist at the American Museum of Natural History’s Hayden Planetarium, your entire body would become something akin to “toothpaste being extruded out of the tube.” Because the gravity inside a black hole is so intense, the body would be simultaneously compressed horizontally while being stretched vertically like a noodle. Funnily enough, this process is called “spaghettification,” and we have British astrophysicist Sir Martin Rees to thank for giving us a term that perfectly nutshells this horrifying possibility (via Britannica).

Depending on how the body entered, the first part would stretch further and further until, as Liu explained, it became “a stream of subatomic particles.” If the brain entered first, it would break down so quickly into its base atomic particles that a person likely wouldn’t even know or understand what was happening to them. Talk about a bad trip. Recently, the aptly named Event Horizon Telescope captured the very first image of Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*), the Milky Way’s very own supermassive black hole. Scientists believe that most large galaxies have supermassive black holes at their center.