Can black holes “eat” matter indefinitely or is there a limit? Do they ever have trouble absorbing large masses or is it always the same?
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This isnt gonna be a good ELI5 answer but I wanted to add some context to some of the other comments here on.
” Neutron stars are formed when a massive star runs out of fuel and collapses. The very central region of the star – the core – collapses, crushing together every proton and electron into a neutron. If the core of the collapsing star is between about 1 and 3 solar masses, these newly-created neutrons can stop the collapse, leaving behind a neutron star. (Stars with higher masses will continue to collapse into stellar-mass black holes.)
This collapse leaves behind the most dense object known – an object with the mass of a sun squished down to the size of a city. These stellar remnants measure about 20 kilometers (12.5 miles) across. One sugar cube of neutron star material would weigh about 1 trillion kilograms (or 1 billion tons) on Earth – about as much as a mountain.”
[Article](https://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/science/objects/neutron_stars1.html)
So basically all for the matter that gets caught in the gravity of a black hole or neutron star gets compressed by gravitational forces so intense that they cause the nuclear forces that rule the structure of atoms to collapse, leaving behind densely packed subatomic particles. Before if you blew up an atom to the size of a football field it would be mostly empty space. Atoms in a black hole or neutron star in the this scenario would have no empty space.
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