Important scientific question of the day

If you were to take a step into a black hole, your body would most closely resemble “toothpaste being extruded out of the tube,” said Charles Liu, an astrophysicist who works at the American Museum of Natural History’s Hayden Planetarium.

Liu said that when an object crosses a black hole’s “event horizon” — its outer boundary, or point of no return — the same physics that causes Earth’s ocean tides begins to take effect. Gravity’s strength decreases with distance, so the moon pulls on the side of the Earth closer to it a bit more vigorously than the side farther from it, and as a result, Earth elongates ever so slightly in the direction of the moon. The land is sturdy, so it doesn’t move much, but the water on Earth’s surface is fluid, so it flows along the elongated axis. “That’s the tidal interaction,” he said.