system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
What happens to the atoms in a black hole?

When things get sucked into a black hole, do the atoms all just get compressed?  Do they break down into quarks?  I know they can't just be destroyed.
gpt
We have no idea. Black holes are these things that pop up in the general theory of relativity, which is a classical, non-quantum theory. It doesn't really deal well with particles and atoms as such. That said, we can make various approximations and come up with some ideas about the way black holes interact with particles (see, for example, Hawking radiation and Neutron stars); it's just that none of them answer your question.

As an example, consider the case of gravitational collapse. As the matter in the collapsing star condenses, the Pauli exclusion principle prevents the electrons in the atoms from occupying the same states. This generates a sort of outward pressure that resists the collapse. But, if there's enough mass, the collapse can proceed anyway. The electrons start being captured by the protons and you get a lot of neutron matter. Eventually, Pauli comes along and applies to the neutrons. But, again, with sufficient mass even that won't be enough and the collapse continues. We don't really know of anything that could stop it at this point, so we model it as proceeding on down to a true zero-dimensional point. But, really, that's just us saying "we don't know what happens to it when it gets that compressed". And that's the way it's going to stay unless we get a real quantum theory of gravity that can tell us how gravity interacts with particles at the quantum level.

So now consider the case where we *have* a black hole. An atom falls in. At first, everything's fine. The gravitational effects at the event horizon are relatively minor and can either be ignored or considered as a minor perturbation to the electromagnetic interactions between the electrons and nucleus. But, eventually, the gravity is going to become *relevant*, and we just don't know how to predict what happens at that point.