If light has no mass why does it get sucked into black holes?
In: Technology
Gravity doesn’t pull on light the same way that it pulls on masses. But gravity isn’t just an attraction between masses, it is more properly understood as a warping of spacetime.
What this means is that while an outside observer might see light as being bent around a black hole, from the point of view of the light it is always traveling in a straight line as it feels no attractive force from gravity (not having mass). Instead space itself is bent, such that a straight line near the black hole isn’t parallel to a straight line a greater distance away.
Light is pulled in and trapped by the black hole because space is warped in such a way that there are directions that lead into the black hole but beyond a certain point there are no directions that lead out. This point of no return is called the “event horizon”.
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