What would happen if I went inside a black hole?
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From the brains behind Brains On, this is Moment of Um. Moment of Um comes to you from APM Studios. I'm Sandon Totten. Phew, what a workout.

Oh, hi! You just caught me after some intense exercise. Mental exercise. Yeah, you see, I like to challenge the old noggin by imagining wild things. Like, just now I was wondering what it would be like if you put a heater and an air conditioner in the same room and cranked them both up.

Or what would eating apples be like if they were long and skinny like bananas? Oh man. Or what if an elevator going up got stuck in quicksand that was pulling it down? I'm working up a sweat just telling you about these brain breakers. But there's one temple teaser I could use some help with. You know, someone to spot me so I don't think harder than my neurons can handle.

The question is, what would happen if I went inside a black hole? Now, I know black holes are so heavy, with so much gravity, that nothing can escape them. But what would it be like falling into one? One of our listeners must be on a similar mental workout plan as me, because they also asked, what would happen if you went into a black hole? Hmm, let's get an astrophysicist to help us. If you were to fall into a black hole, one thing we know for sure is that you're never getting out.

Hi, my name is Dakota Tyler and I'm an astrophysicist at UCLA. I study objects out on the universe, stars, planets, black holes. A black hole is just an object that's so dense that the gravity that it has is so immense that even light can't escape.

What you would experience as you were falling into it is that it actually pulls on one side of your body a little bit more strongly than it pulls on the other side.

And as you get closer, it pulls even harder on your feet than your head. And as you get closer, it pulls even harder and harder. And soon you find yourself stretched in a straight line. And once you keep going, you'll find that all of the molecules and atoms in your body get stretched into a really thin piece of spaghetti. And this is called spaghettification.

You wouldn't want to go directly into a black hole. But let's think about a spacesuit that you had on that was so strong and sturdy that you could be completely protected from this process. Another cool thing to think about is what you would see as you looked out into the universe and you're falling into the black hole.

Now, if you had friends that were in a spaceship watching you enter the black hole, they would see you start to slow down because as you get close to a black hole, time actually changes. It runs more slowly for objects that are near the black hole. So your friends would see you start to move in slow motion. But as you turned around and looked back at your friends in the spaceship,

you would actually see them start to speed up. It would look like they were on fast forward on two X speed or three X or four X speed. And I think that that's a really cool thing to think about when falling into a black hole. Of course, there are no black holes anywhere around us. So this isn't something that we have to worry about. There aren't black holes going around eating things up or anything like that. They're just minding their own business. Um, uh,

That was a real mind-masher. I almost couldn't imagine it. So, when something goes into a black hole, the strong force of gravity there pulls unequally on the atoms of that thing. Eventually, the atoms get pulled into these long, thin strands, like spaghetti. I wonder what would happen if spaghetti went into a black hole. Spaghetti-fied spaghetti?

I'll save that for my next workout. Now it's time to cool down. That's where I imagine super simple things. Like yellow. What a great color. So happy. So yellow. If you liked this episode, take a second to subscribe to Moment of Om wherever you listen to podcasts. And if you dig big ideas, check out the Brains On podcast, where we have a whole episode all about the theory of the multiverse.

Want to see our shows come to life? Head to YouTube, where we've got awesome animated Brains On episodes. Search Brains On Universe on YouTube and subscribe. If you have a question, we'd love to help you answer it. Drop us a line by going to brainson.org slash contact. See you next time and the next day and every weekday. Until then, um. Um. Um. Um. Um. Um. Um. Um.

Okay, here's a real tough one. What if you put bread between a slice of peanut butter and a slice of jelly? Ouch! Ooh, I think I pulled a neuron on that one.