In the vicinity of black holes, the gravitational pull on an object changes so much from point to point that anything that can get too close will be stretched and stretched and stretched until it becomes essentially a noodle of atoms. A person could get stretched to 70 light-years of noodly former human. 

While it isn’t too hard to imagine a black hole stretching a person, black holes can also do this to stars. In new research published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (MNRAS), researchers led by Giacomo Cannizzaro show evidence for a black hole caught in the act of spaghettifing a star. While the flashes of light a star gives off while making its final dive into a black hole have been seen many times, for the first time, the absorption lines of a spaghettified star have been spotted. Literally, the gaps in the light from where the star’s atoms absorb light were seen in observations from multiple telescopes looking in different parts of the electromagnetic spectrum. According to the press release: …absorption lines above a black hole’s pole suggest there is a long strand wrapped many times all around the black hole, like a yarn ball: the actual material ligament from a freshly torn star.

As a knitter, I want to say, “Challenge accepted.” Unfortunately, this yarn winding of star stuff is in a pretty distant galaxy, so I guess I’m going to need to stick to wool for now.

More Information

SRON press release

“Accretion disc cooling and narrow absorption lines in the tidal disruption event AT 2019dsg,” G Cannizzaro et al., 2021 March 24, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society