eli5: what happens to things in blackholes? where do they go?
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A black hole is basically a star like our sun. It just has so much mass, that the gravity is strong enough to prevent even light from escaping. So anything that my be pulled into a black hole would burn up, or be crushed to the point it’s atoms are broken apart and it ceases to exist.
You can think of a black hole as an insane magnet made of a cloud. Everything gets smeared out and incorporated in the black hole, and the black hole has grown a minute tiny bit.
When an object actually gets sucked into a black hole, the process is called “spaghettification,” whereby the thing basically gets pulled into a long thin strand of atoms, which just become part of the black hole’s mass
To put it simply, the go *nowhere* as in they stop moving and become part of the singularity. Think of a black hole not as a “hole” but as a planet with attraction so high, that not even something moving the speed of light can escape it.
We don’t know and (most likely) can’t know. All information that falls into a Black Hole is lost, and no information can be recovered from behind the event horizon.
The closest things we can observe to what happens at the singularity of a black hole are neutron stars, as there’s such a fine line between them in their formation.
In neutron stars, the matter is squeezed so tightly that the atoms themselves disintegrate into their constituent particles and merge into a sort of paste, to vastly oversimplify things. It’s likely that what happens inside a black hole is similar, though probably much weirder in practice.
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