How do black holes “consume” light?

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How do black holes “consume” light?

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Anonymous 0 Comments

A small steel ball comes within the gravity of the Moon. It spirals in and eventually lands. It can’t get back out unless something accelerates it fast enough to escape the Moon’s gravity (escape velocity). In this case, that’s less than twice as fast as some rifles can shoot a bullet, so not crazy fast. If we designed a rifle for this purpose, or if we used a halfway decent rail gun, we could shoot that ball back out of the Moon’s gravity.

Light comes within the gravity of a black hole. The gravity is so great that the light goes to land on the black hole too, but now even the speed of light is below the escape velocity of the black hole’s gravity, so the light cannot escape the gravity to come back out again.

I know there’s no real “landing” on a black hole, but that’s the ELI5 explanation.

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