• Question: what is the biggest gravitational pull known to man and what would it do to us

    Asked by Jack W to Daniel, Hannah, Maggie, Ry, Scott on 7 Nov 2017.
    • Photo: Ry Cutter

      Ry Cutter answered on 7 Nov 2017:

      There are two ways to answer this.
      Gravity we can directly measure, and gravity we can predict.
      With gravity we can measure neutron stars are probably the best candidates, they are about twice the mass of the sun squished into an area the size of Birmingham! Some scientists think that neutron stars have a crust like Earth and they experience something called “starquakes”. It’s where a piece of this crust falls a few centimeters… doesn’t sound very far right? But the gravitational pull is so strong and the material is accelerated to near the speeds of light in just a few centimeters. Here a human would just get squished. The atoms that make a human would probably all turn into neutrons.
      Wwith gravity we can predict, black holes take the cake! If you were to go passed the event horizon and go a little closer to the middle of the black hole you would easily experience over 100 Billion times the gravity here on Earth! I think currently, the heaviest known black hole is 30 Billion times the mass of our sun! If a human were to go through a black hole it would look really weird. From the outside, the human would look like they’re frozen in time. On the inside the human would stretch out, the process is called spaghettification.
      So high gravity isn’t very fun for humans :p

      Great question,

      Ryan

    • Photo: Scott Melville

      Scott Melville answered on 7 Nov 2017:

      Ryan’s answer is fantastic – I can’t top that 🙂
      I guess I’ll add that we have measured the gravitational pull of black holes – we can ‘see’ the supermassive ones that live at the center of galaxies (because of how the nearby stars move around them), and ‘hear’ the smaller ones which smash into each other (because of the loud noise they make, in the form of gravitational waves) – so they’re as real as neutron stars are 😉
      Spaghettification is by far the coolest thing that happens to people near black holes. A second cool thing which happens is ‘time dilation’, which means that the time you feel is much slower than the time that everyone else feels (Ever seen Interstellar?). So if you could hang out near a black hole (or neutron star) for a few minutes, then come back to Earth, everyone would have aged by several years!

    • Photo: Maggie Lieu

      Maggie Lieu answered on 7 Nov 2017:

      Einstein showed the fastest anything could travel is the speed of light.

      Black holes are the only thing with enough gravity that even light would not be able to escape its pull! So the I would say black holes. But since nothing can ever escape a black hole once it has passed the line of no return (aka the event horizon), this means that we don’t really know what happens inside there!

      There is a theory however that if you fall feet first into a black hole, your feet will be pulled much more than your head and so the black hole would spaghettify you! It would stretch you out like a long strand of spaghetti, ouch it must hurt!

    • Photo: Hannah Middleton

      Hannah Middleton answered on 8 Nov 2017:

      I would choose black holes too! The the effect of spaghettification, where get stretched out is because of “tidal forces”. The material closest to the black hole (your feet) experience a stronger gravitational pull than the material furthest away (your head). This can happen to stars too, if they get too close to a black hole, then the side closest to the black hole gets pulled in more strongly and the star can even break apart.

      Have you seen the movie Interstellar? In that film, they land on a planet orbiting a black hole and the planet has huge tidal waves. That’s because the black hole has a very large gravitational pull on the water on the side of the planet closest to it, pulling the water level up and making enormous tides. On the Earth, the Moon pulls on the ocean water and makes tides, but on a much smaller scale.

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