Tidal stretching near a black hole

Assembled from 16 blocks · 1 evidence · 15 related

1. Story
2. The differential pull across an extended body, stronger at the near end than the far end, which stretches it along the radial direction and squeezes it transversely. The scaling is what makes it interesting rather than merely gruesome: tidal acceleration at a fixed multiple of the Schwarzschild radius falls as the inverse square of the mass, because the radius grows linearly with mass while the tide falls as the cube of distance. A stellar-mass black hole would therefore destroy an infalling body thousands of kilometres outside its horizon, whereas at the horizon of M87* the tide is so small it would be undetectable without instruments. That inverts the intuition the subject usually carries: the larger and more terrifying the black hole, the gentler the crossing. It is also why stars are torn apart outside supermassive holes only within a tidal radius that, for the largest, lies inside the horizon - so the most massive black holes swallow stars whole and produce no flare at all. Not a place on Earth.
3. Knowledge
4. Schwarzschild radius
5. Tidal stretching near a black hole
6. Connections
7. Schwarzschild radius
8. Karl Schwarzschild
9. The event horizon
10. The photon sphere and the shadow
11. Time dilation near a horizon
12. Tidal stretching near a black hole
13. Einstein presents the field equations of general relativity
14. Schwarzschild solves the field equations for a point mass
15. Evidence
16. The first exact solution of the Einstein field equations for the vacuum outside a spherical mass, containing the radius now named for its author. V55 VERIFICATION BASIS: the paper was NOT consulted in this session - WebFetch was refused by the network egress proxy for every host attempted and the WebSearch budget was exhausted before authoring began. Title, venue and page range are given from the author's recall of a canonical citation and must be checked.