The Spaghettification Effect

Near a stellar-mass black hole, the tidal forces are extreme. The gravity pulling on your feet would be far stronger than the gravity pulling on your head. This difference would stretch you into a thin strand of atoms — a process physicists call spaghettification. It would happen well before you reached the event horizon.

The stretching force depends on how steep the gravitational gradient is. Smaller black holes have steeper gradients near their event horizons, making spaghettification fierce and fatal. A supermassive black hole tells a different story.