Hawking coined ‘spaghettification’
When a star passes too near a black hole, it gets tied up in its gravitational field. Eventually, the star gets close enough to the black hole that it gets stretched out and swirled into the black hole’s accretion disk, or the collection of superheated matter that surrounds it. (The same would happen to you if you got too close to a black hole.) This process is called spaghettification because (you guessed it) spaghetti is delicious. No, I’m just joking: it’s because the star’s material has been stretched and compressed. Well, spaghettification is a term coined by the late astrophysicist Stephen Hawking in his seminal work, A Brief History of Time. Trinity College Dublin has a great explainer of spaghettification, and you can read about stars getting spaghettified on this very site.
