I think you literally stretch; the part of you that touches the horizon line first experiences infinite gravity, while the parts of you outside the horizon line don't, so you're getting stretched out as the parts inside the horizon line fall in much faster

Edit: read the reply to my comment, they're probably more right than me lol

[–] Sasha@lemmy.blahaj.zone 11 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

No, that's not the case at all.

If you fall into a black hole, you can do no experiment to detect the horizon, it's a completely unremarkable region of space to you. Infinite gravity is only really a thing at the singularity, but that's almost definitely just because our theoretical models breakdown and stop giving accurate descriptions of reality there.

The stretching is just because of tidal forces, which means that gravity gets so much stronger closer to the black hole that your feet are pulled harder than your head, you experience the same thing standing on earth, it's just that the change in gravity is basically negligible here.

Source: Was a black hole physicist for a while

Small edit: Tidal forces stretch you in the exact same way that they stretch the ocean, thus creating ocean tides.

[–] LinkOpensChest_wav@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 points 5 months ago

Read this in Stephen Hawking's voice