Supermassive black holes represent one of the biggest head-scratchers in the Universe. These behemoths weighing millions to tens of billions of Suns lurk at the center of just about every galaxy – the gravitational heart around which stars and planets and clouds of shimmering gas whirl in an intricate dance.

The term for this gruesome process is actually " spaghettification ," according to NASA, inspired by Stephen Hawking's book, A Brief History of Time. In it, the late theoretical physicist first described what would happen to a person approaching a black hole's " event horizon " — its point of no return — in space.