A Bigger Black Hole Would Stretch You to Death More Slowly
A small one may tear you apart before you got inside, while a giant one would probably let you travel for a while first.
Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell · Black Holes Explained – From Birth to DeathFall feet first toward a black hole and your feet get pulled much harder than your head.
That difference is what may kill you. Close to a black hole, gravity gets stronger so fast that moving just a few centimeters closer can mean millions of times more force. One end of your body is yanked away from the other, your cells are torn apart, and your body stretches longer and thinner.
What happens past the boundary is unknown. It might happen in two possible ways. One possibility is that this stretching continues until your body becomes a hot flow as narrow as a single atom. The other possibility is that you hit a firewall and are stopped very soon after crossing.
Whether stretching turns fatal quickly is a matter of size. A smaller black hole packs its pull so tightly that it may kill you before you even reach its outer boundary. A far more massive black hole spreads that same deadly change in gravity over a much larger distance.
So inside an especially huge black hole, you probably could keep traveling for quite a while before the stretching turned fatal. In general, greater distance from the dense center buys more survival time.
In other words, all black holes could pull you apart, but a bigger one gives you more room, and more time, before they do.
Questions people ask
Why is the pull on my feet so different from the pull on my head?
Gravity gets stronger as you get closer to a massive object. Near a black hole, the mass is packed so tightly that the increase happens over a very short distance. Your feet, being even slightly closer, can feel millions of times more pull than your head, and that gap stretches you apart.
Why does a bigger black hole pull more gently?
A more massive black hole has its point of no return much farther from its center. At that greater distance, gravity changes less sharply from one centimeter to the next. The stretching is therefore weaker at the entrance, and only becomes lethal deeper inside.
Would being stretched into plasma hurt?
Nobody can say whether it would hurt, because the process past the horizon is unknown. Both the stretching and the firewall are only guesses about an interior we cannot observe.