Before we move on...

Black holes are interesting, but I'm ready to move on so I can cover what I feel like at that moment. I'll deal with one last thing before I go on to something else though.

One thing that many people think when they hear 'black hole' is that if it is a hole, what is at the bottom? A seemingly logical question, and really the fact is that we don't know for sure. We have theories and models that explain what we observe, but we can't actually -test- anything. Any probe or signal we send into a black hole won't ever come out, so we can never really know what goes on at the center.

But lets say you jumped into a black hole to find out what was at the bottom. Would you ever reach a bottom? Could it open into somewhere else?

Both are possible, but really irrelevant. You will never see the bottom of a black hole. Recall earlier that gravity is proportional to the -square- of a distance. Meaning if you are twice as close to something, you experience -four- times the gravity. This means that, amongst other things, your feet are actually being pulled by gravity stronger than your head is, because your feet are closer to the Earth's center of gravity. However, the difference on Earth is so small that it is negligible.

Consider a black hole though, with gravity many times stronger. If you jumped into a black hole feet first, you would slowly begin to feel the gravity at your feet become stronger at your head. This means that your feet would start falling faster than the rest of your body, because gravity is pulling on them more.

You would eventually start to feel stretched as the difference between the gravity at your feet and your head grows stronger. You would slowly start to physically stretch out, your body being ripped apart from the difference in gravity. Eventually you'd stretch into a macabre noodle, as if you were the rope in an astronomical tug of war. This is what we call spaghettification, where your body is pulled into something very much like a spaghetti noodle.

So, who's hungry?