Falling into a black hole would stretch your body into a thin strand of atoms through a process called spaghettification.

The term spaghettification was popularized by Stephen Hawking in his 1988 book, A Brief History of Time. It describes the vertical stretching and horizontal compression of objects caused by extreme tidal forces near a black hole. Because gravity follows the inverse-square law, the pull on your feet would be millions of times stronger than the pull on your head if you fell in feet-first.For a stellar-mass black hole, which typically contains about 10 to 20 times the mass of our Sun, these tidal forces become lethal long before you reach the event horizon. The gradient is so steep that the human body would be torn apart at a molecular level. This process effectively turns any solid object into a thin stream of plasma and subatomic particles.Interestingly, the experience differs with supermassive black holes, like Sagittarius A* at the center of our galaxy. Because these black holes are so large, the event horizon is much further from the singularity. This means the tidal force gradient is shallower, potentially allowing an astronaut to cross the event horizon safely before being shredded deeper inside.Physicists use General Relativity to calculate these effects, noting that the object is not just stretched but also squeezed from the sides. This simultaneous stretching and squeezing is what creates the noodle-like shape. While no human has ever witnessed this, the behavior of stars being disrupted by black holes, known as Tidal Disruption Events (TDEs), provides observational evidence for this phenomenon.