Black Hole Spaghettification

This simulation shows why falling into a black hole stretches an object into a thread of debris. A jointed chain of masses and springs, standing in for anything from a spacecraft to an unlucky star, falls radially toward a black hole rendered as a dark center ringed by an accretion disk. Because gravity is stronger on the chain's near end than its far end, and that difference grows roughly as 1/r³, the chain elongates and thins as it falls — slowly at first, then catastrophically once it is close. Adjust the black hole's mass to see the real astrophysical asymmetry: a small, stellar-mass hole destroys objects violently outside its horizon, while a supermassive hole's much gentler local tidal gradient can let an object cross the horizon comparatively intact before being torn apart deeper inside.