Free Form: Spaghetti shouldn't be a part of physics, but...

A while back, I wrote a blog post on G2, a gas cloud about to be eaten by our galaxy's black hole, Sagittarius A*.  In the post, I wrote about spaghettification (because a blog post on black holes without spaghettification is hardly a blog post at all) and lamented the lack of good spaghettification GIFs on the internet.  Professor Johnson saw my cry and told me that I should send an email to James Guillochon, an Einstein Fellow at the Harvard CfA who focuses on collisions in astrological systems.  So I did, and we set up a meeting to talk about the more intricate details about spaghettification.

I don't have the best background in computers, so the chances of me actually creating my own spaghettification GIF--the original purpose of the meeting with Dr. Guillochon-- are pretty slim.  But from the meeting, I did get the knowledge necessary to understand how such a GIF would work.

Spaghettification happens because the tidal forces from the massive object (in this case, Sagittarius A*) are stronger than the gravitational binding forces of the spaghettified object.  That object gets ripped apart and the individual pieces then move on their own Keplerian orbits.  The first step to making this GIF is to think of the object being spaghettified as millions and millions of point masses.  Then, one could use a computer program to assess the gravitational potential energy of each individual point.

The picture above is of the situation right before spaghettification.  Already, because of tidal forces, the particles closest to Sag A* are slower than the ones on the opposite side because Sag A* is pulling more on the particles closest to it.  

When I get more computer skills (which should probably happen eventually), I'm going to give the world a real spaghettification GIF.  Until then, I'll have to be satisfied with the fact that I know, in theory, how that program will work.