alyssasaccount

alyssasaccount t1_jas19c0 wrote

> would happen due to the magnetic field way before gravity

There isn’t necessarily any magnetic field. Spaghettification happens even in an idealized non-rotating, charge-neutral black hole.

> ripping of the physical structure across the weak points

Those points are bonded together by some kind of chemical bond, like hydrogen bonds between different atoms.

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alyssasaccount t1_jarry8z wrote

In short, it’s basically a hybrid.

From the point of view of a body experiencing it, it’s just an extreme tidal force (which is not actually a force, but the rate of change of acceleration induced by some force with respect to position). It is space time being stretched, and that would produce tension on an object falling into a black hole (and I think there’s also compression in directions perpendicular to that tension, as depicted in the image you shared, but I don’t recall the details off the top of my head). Early on, that tension is not sufficient to break apart molecular bonds, but eventually it is, and the object will indeed get ripped apart. Eventually that tidal force might be strong enough that molecules get ripped apart, and at some point the curvature could be enough that you have to modify the very description of fundamental particles, at which point you’re getting into questions of quantum gravity, which are beyond the scope of experiment at present, and for which there are no generally accepted theories.

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alyssasaccount t1_j29uat7 wrote

The are not really empty. But the nucleus of atoms has a lot of matter packed into a small area.

Atoms can be best understood as quantum mechanical objects, which basically means they are waves, kind of like sound waves in air, but they are standing waves, like a vibrating string. The nucleus is is a really intense wave concentrated in a very small area, kind of like the spike of water that leaps up when you drove a small rock into water, whereas the electrons form much smaller waves distributed over a larger area, more like the ripples that radiate out.

The thing about those electron waves is that they like to be pretty close, but not overlap too much, and that’s what allows molecules to form and what keeps molecules from collapsing into a single super-atom, and also what keeps substances made out of molecules from collapsing. If you try to get an atom to pass through another one, those waves will bump up against each other and prevent it from happening, unless they’re moving really fast.

So in short, it’s not that atoms are empty, but that atomic nuclei are really dense.

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