Tidal stretching near a black hole

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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.

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