Could a black hole swallow you in seconds if you pass near one?
Passing near a black hole does not automatically mean youll be “sucked in” from a distance — at long range a black holes gravity behaves like any other mass. Whether you would be swallowed in seconds depends primarily on the black holes mass and your closest approach: stellar‑mass black holes have very small event horizons and extremely steep gradients in gravity, so if you come within a few times the Schwarzschild radius tidal forces can tear you apart and carry you across the event horizon in a very short proper time. By contrast, supermassive black holes have much larger horizons and gentler tidal forces at the horizon, meaning you could cross it without immediate destruction and your fall to the singularity may take much longer.
The destructive process often described as “spaghettification” is driven by differential gravity — tidal forces that scale strongly with proximity (roughly like 1/r^3 in Newtonian terms). For small black holes those tidal forces become lethal well outside the horizon, stretching and compressing you so violently that any crossing would be effectively instantaneous from your own frame. For very large black holes, tidal forces at the horizon can be weak enough that you would not notice extreme stretching at the moment you cross, although escape after crossing is impossible.
From an outside observer’s perspective, relativity adds another twist: due to gravitational time dilation you would appear to slow and fade as you approach the horizon, never seen to complete the fall in finite external time. In your own proper time you either meet the singularity after a finite interval or are destroyed by tidal forces before crossing — so the answer to whether you’d be swallowed in seconds is: it depends on the black hole’s mass, how close you pass, and the interplay between tidal forces and relativistic time effects.
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